What bank or credit union CEO doesn’t think about cutting their training budget in the middle of an industry crisis that impacts earnings in a big way?
With big potential gains in market share at stake as we move into the upswing after the current crisis, sales training is the one category of training you can’t afford to cut. The opportunity cost in lost loans and deposits is just too great.
So what, then? Do it yourself to save money? History has shown that doing it yourself can be a lot more costly than you might think.
Every dollar you spend in human capital to create your own sales training can actually accelerate the weakening of your sales culture if the time invested doesn’t increase sales or, even worse, results in product pushing and sales discomfort that can damage a salesperson for life.
Today most organizations have professional trainers who are highly skilled at program development and classroom presentation. Yet how many of these trainers have practical sales experience, have the time to study industry best practices in selling, or can engage your top performing sellers in the classroom? Very few.
In our more than 45 years of sales consulting for banks and credit unions our team has seen fewer than a dozen Internally developed sales training programs that weren’t overly simplistic rip-offs of a prior employers’ program or product training disguised as sales training.
Sales training is simple, but it isn’t easy if you haven’t first developed a preferred way of selling for each selling role around which to train. Only an outside group with years of industry sales experience can give you this, and without it, you risk emphasizing the wrong behaviors. reinforcing negative stereotypes about selling that detract from its true purpose of helping others and not moving the sales production numbers.
Add together the months of multiple salaries invested in program development, the opportunity cost in lost sales over several years if your program doesn’t actually increase sales, and the potential cost of regaining lost credibility for your sales culture if your program isn’t well-received by your best performing bankers. That’s the real cost of do it yourself sales training.
You only get one opportunity to do sales right when conditions are suddenly optimal for achieving big gains in market share. In the end, you’re not really saving money with do it yourself sales training if you’re not making money through better selling.
