What We Learned From the 2009 Financial Crisis
What’s next for bank and credit union selling after the world has seemingly turned upside down overnight?
Right now your employees and your customers are focused totally on their health, on their personal financial survival, and on the survival of their businesses, as they should be.
In the midst of this disruption, smart marketers are laying the foundation for big gains in market share based on lessons learned from the last industry crisis in 2009. During the upswing following the last crisis some organizations made huge gains in growth at the expense of others. They were the companies whose employees were ready to sell.
The opportunity to achieve a fast ROI on your sales efforts will be enormous as customers rethink their finances and banking relationships, reflect on their losses, and consider the new opportunities open to them.
The word fast is key because the recovery is likely to be larger and faster than last time, and the big winners last time were the companies that got the jump on others by using the down period to improve their processes and their sales efforts.
As the nation’s longest operating sales practice for banks and credit unions we’ve seen firsthand what works and what doesn’t work in refocusing and reenergizing a sales team after a crisis. The principles are simple, but successful execution of these principles requires a narrow focus on your best opportunities and a wholistic, integrated approach to sales.
Here’s what we recommend based on what we’ve learned from prior crises:
1. Create a compelling mission to refocus your employees on sales quickly after the crisis.
Begin now to communicate to your employees the importance of your post-crisis mission to help families and businesses get back on their feet. Continually position selling as helping and set big goals for how many customers and prospects you want to help over the second half of the year.
2. Adjust scorecards, goals and sales incentives during the crisis, and again after the crisis, so you don’t lose employee trust and motivation.
When goals are viewed as either unachievable or too easy to accomplish you‘re less likely to motivate employees to give discretionary effort, and you can’t easily hold employees accountable for their performance.
When conditions are changing dramatically, it’s especially important to rely on a balanced scorecard of performance Including behavioral metrics rather than rely solely on sales volume metrics.
3. Use new customer behavior adopted during the crisis such as social distancing to your advantage.
We’re already working with clients to develop strategies for selling more effectively through the drive-up window, the contact center, videoconferencing and online account opening and lending.
4. Use the chaos in the job market to hire bankers who can sell for key positions based on their strengths for specific selling roles.
There will be thousands of people newly available to you, including current employees who are underutilized, who have top producer sales potential based on their behavioral competencies for a specific selling role regardless of their experience. This is especially critical for job roles that are becoming more sales focused such as contact center reps, universal banker and front line supervision.
Upgrade your team by asking line sales leaders to recruit aggressively now when you don’t need staff and by pre-qualifying candidates quickly with role-specific online behavioral testing rather than non-predictive personality tests.
5. Avoid the herd mentality post-crisis rush to e-learning for sales training and instead focus on classroom or small group remote learning featuring disciplined practice and follow-up skill mastery certification.
E-learning is great for learning facts and procedures and for skill reinforcement. However, research has proven that you don’t learn social skills and conversation behaviors like selling without interacting with real people through disciplined practice and getting feedback on the subtleties of those interactions.
Training is really about making people the same in some important way. If you don’t use this time to define clearly your Preferred Way of Selling for each job role, any sales training you do will be a waste of money.
6. Provide existing customers with more attention and easier access to skilled advisors at a time when your customers will be seeking comfort and advice.
This may require you to convert more service staff to universal bankers and create relationship officers to manage high value relationships.
7. Invest in CRM technology that your sales team will actually use and teach your team how to sell with CRM.
The shortest distance between failure and success in selling in a rebound is a straight line to the prospects most likely to buy. CRM can assure that your resources are applied immediately to your best opportunities. Yet very few frontline bankers know how to use their CRM tools effectively in selling, and poorly designed systems providing too many features and screens often make sales conversations with customers overly time consuming and awkward.
8. Use this time to prepare senior sales leaders to provide focus and accountability for selling and to model behaviorally specific coaching for branch and department sales leaders.
Nothing restarts the sales engine faster than senior sales leaders making sales a priority. Similarly, the best way to get frontline managers coaching is to get senior sales leaders coaching.
9. Lay out a game plan for commercial lending and business development teams to rebuild your sales pipeline with blitz call campaigns to target customers and prospects.
You only have one chance to be first to help a business solve a problem. Every call should be made to achieve a specific next step customer action to move the relationship forward, even if the call is a videoconference to influencers who are working remotely at home.
Start Now So You Hit the Upswing at Full Speed
None of these recommendations require rocket science, but they are all based on science and on the lessons of recent history. None will have the desired impact if you start late.
The secret sauce of sales and marketing has always been to narrow your focus to your best opportunities and to strike fast so you dominate the moment or your target market. That’s what has worked for the winners in the upswing that has followed every major crisis.
With so many people in banks and credit unions working remotely or working on the frontline in the midst of chaos, nothing overcomes their fear or offers more hope than the promise of participating in a big mission to help others in need.
Your job is to define that mission and to sell it in time to capture your opportunity.
