by James Schneider | Jan 23, 2019
Most sales leaders treat all people and all selling situations as if they were the same. They’re not. A 7’7″ basketball player like former NBA player Manute Bol may not be very skilled at shooting and dribbling, but he may be the player on the team best fit to rebound and to block shots. Similarly, an employee may not have the patience, empathy and planning skills to succeed at long cycle selling, but he may be our company’s best salesperson at prospecting and closing short cycle transactional sales.
National research of high performing salespeople in the financial services industry by Schneider Sales Management, Inc. has proven that almost all sales positions and all distinguishing sets of sales competencies can be described by five selling roles based on the behavioral requirements for success in the job. These roles are appropriate for all financial institutions based on the behavior competencies required to perform each role.
All top producing salespeople have some crucial competencies in common, such as strong achievement drive, but each selling role requires some competencies that are different than those required for other selling roles.
If you are a hiring manager or a sales manager, it is your responsibility within your bank or credit union to define clearly what each employee’s role in selling is, and to fit the right people to the right role to build a successful team.
Choosing the right sales practices, the right performance metrics and the right coaching priorities is easy once you’ve defined each employee’s role in selling.
Here is more information on each of the five main financial industry selling roles in banks and credit unions.
Service: Job requires servicing customer transactions and maintaining friendly customer relations, and may require conducting some referral or suggestive selling.
Consultative Selling: Job requires completing sales and service transactions, advising customers on product selection or use, closing first sales quickly, making add-on or follow-up sales, and managing selected customer relationships in primarily in-store, customer-initiated conversations. In blended sales and service positions the job may also require proactive outreach to approach and engage in-store customers to create sales opportunities.
Competitive Selling: Job requires continuous prospecting, competing for sales persistently despite high rejection rates, conducting minimal after-sale servicing, and closing competitive sales in one or two interviews using emotional pressure.
Complex Selling: Job requires closing large, complex or technical sales over a long selling cycle, analyzing prospect problems and product applications to propose customized solutions, networking socially for new business, and retaining and developing customer relationships over time.
Sales Supervision: Job primarily requires direct supervision and coaching of sales personnel and/or their supervisors, and typically requires some personal selling. In senior level positions the job also requires sales planning.
by Mike Shallanberger | Dec 19, 2018
Will AI, in-branch, and self-help technology replace salespeople at banks and credit unions? The simple answer is NO according to a gathering of banking and tech thought leaders at the recent Future Branches conference in Austin, TX. But it will change how branch sales roles function, and add some key competencies required for salespeople.
While technology helps tremendously with understanding customer behavior, prospecting, and creating great customer journeys, there will always be a need for salespeople who can form and maintain relationships as a trusted advisor. No technology can build trust the way a great salesperson with keen emotional intelligence can. People are also needed to handle the sale of complex products, and to sell the benefits of new technology in order to drive adoption.
An article in the Harvard Business Journal suggests that, “Humans will need to focus on managing exceptions, tolerating ambiguity, using judgment, shaping the strategies and questions that machines will help enable and answer, and managing an increasingly complex web of relationships with employees and customers.”
For deeper conversations about how your bank or credit union hiring and sales practices may change as technology changes, sign up for the Schneider Report now.
by James Schneider | Dec 19, 2018
Can introverts be effective salespeople at banks or credit unions? The cost of one bad sales hire for a financial institution can be astronomical, so in order to avoid a mistake, many hiring managers look for the classic “sales personality.” Many people associate extroverted behavior and a “big” personality with success as a salesperson; however, that limiting belief may be doing more harm than good to your salesforce.
The truth is that introverts can make excellent salespeople. While extraverts get more energy from being around people, introverts can get more energy from quiet time on their own. While extroverts may talk more and seek out others often, introverts can often spend more time thinking and contemplating before acting. This means that introverts may be perfectly suited for a longer sales-cycle product in a complex selling role like a Commercial Loan Officer, Wealth Management Advisor, or Private Banker.
It’s actually rare that a person is a complete extrovert or introvert. Most people fall somewhere in the middle of what is commonly referred to as the “energy spectrum.” People in a complex selling role need the skills of self-control, organization, patient listening, and empathy commonly associated with introverts. Meanwhile, extraverts in these sales job roles may suffer if they have too high of a drive to persuade or too much sociability that could distract them.
The bottom line is that there is no such thing as one successful “sales personality.” Instead, a person’s individual behavioral traits and competencies must be appropriately matched to a sales role if a hiring manager wants to be successful in interviewing and filling a job opening at a bank or credit union.
The Optimum Performance Profile™ hiring tool screens candidates for the behavioral competencies that drive success in each selling role, and it delivers a score that compares a sales candidate to the top performers in a specific selling role. See an example of an OPP report to see how much data this assessment provides, as well as the interview questions towards the end of the report, which can guide the hiring manager’s interview to explore a potential mismatch before an expensive hiring mistake is made.
by James Schneider | Dec 13, 2018
The moment when a hiring manager shakes the hand of a new hire and welcomes him or her to the team is a hopeful one on both sides of the agreement. Salespeople begin with great hope that they’ll have the staff support and goal structure to help customers and the ability to earn a living while they’re at it. Hiring managers hope that the hire will be a good fit— that they won’t have to interview again for the same role due to employee turnover.
Salespeople who join an organization may not succeed for several reasons. The failure to succeed in selling may show up in sales conversations — the salesperson could “dump” product features on customers, give price or product details too early in the sale, or end conversations with no next step commitment. This ends up in low conversion rates, low performance, and low sales numbers.
One of the main reasons that salespeople fail is because they have been hired for a sales role for which they are not the right fit. We know that different selling roles require different competencies. The industry research we conducted with the University of Colorado at Denver Business School proves that there are actually five primary selling roles in banks and credit unions, each requiring a different set of competencies that drive high performance.
The five roles are SERVICE SELLING (think “teller”), CONSULTATIVE SELLING (think “personal banker”), COMPETITIVE SELLING (think “commissioned mortgage originator” or “business development officer”), COMPLEX SELLING (think “commercial lender”), and SALES SUPERVISION (think “branch manager” or “sales manager”).
Two additional roles, FRONTLINE SUPERVISION (think “teller supervisor”) and ENGAGEMENT SELLING (think “universal banker”) are subsets of these primary roles.
For hiring managers, it’s vital to get an assessment that can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate for the specific type of selling that they’ll be doing every day. These hiring managers need to look at sales capability as a series of skills that can be improved, not a natural-born talent or personality fit.
The most important first step for financial industry hiring managers is to screen candidates using the Optimum Performance Profile™ sales assessment. This cutting-edge hiring tool is based on the results of our industry research, and it can predict a salesperson’s performance with a much higher degree of accuracy than a standard interview.
Learn more about these assessments today to improve the success rates of your bank or credit union’s new hires, and get in touch for a free trial so you can increase revenue in 2019.
by Mike Shallanberger | Dec 10, 2018
Coaching is just about every banker’s favorite buzzword. The problem is no one is actually doing it.
Sure, most managers check off their brief conversations with employees about “getting their numbers up” as a coaching conversation, but only a small fraction of bank managers are actually having conversations with their employees to give them specific guidance on how to get better at selling.
And who gets coached the least? Typically it’s new employees and top producers, the employees who want coaching the most and who will give you the best return on your investment in terms of increased sales production.
So what makes a great sales coach?
An average sales coach may occasionally conduct observation coaching with managers, but those sessions are often not specific and unfocused.
A great sales coach will record his or her observations of each employee’s use of preferred selling behavior on an observation notes form and give employees constructive, documented feedback based on those observations.
An average sales coach will use generalizations when categorizing sales behavior. A great sales coach will state his or her expectations for sales production, sales activity, and non-negotiable behavior to his or her direct reports in ways that the staff can restate clearly to others.
An average sales coach might hold sales meetings to develop employee skills in describing products’ features —but a great sales coach will create a peer coaching system that supports the company’s values and preferred way of selling.
Demonstrating preferred sales behavior is also a high priority of great sales coaches. Specific goals for sales managers like “Reduce my average time of talking per customer sales interview from 70% to 30%,” or “Make at least one statement of clear difference during every customer sales interview,” can help set the tone for each sales and service employee – and the sales culture in general.
Get your sales culture strong in 2019. Contact Schneider Sales Management, Inc. today for a consultation and conversation about how we can help you increase your revenue and improve your return on investment for each and every employee in your company. 303-221-4511
by James Schneider | Nov 10, 2018
One of the most valuable ways that sales managers can impact the overall revenue of a bank or credit union is to adjust his or her mindset for success and support their sales staff as they adjust their mindsets about selling. It’s a non-negotiable part of achieving and exceeding your revenue goals, and while it’s a simple shift, it’s not always easy to change deeply-held beliefs about selling.
The biggest obstacle to making a quantum leap in sales production or profit contribution of 50% or more is the belief that it’s not possible. As consultants to financial institutions for more than forty years, our team at Schneider Sales Management, Inc. has seen this limiting belief again and again.
Making a quantum leap is possible. Believe it.
The difference in sales results between average and top performers is often 100%, or more, yet the differences in what they say or do to produce these results are usually very small. For many employees, achieving a quantum leap in performance may require doing 2 or 3 things different or better. For others, they may only have to apply more effort by increasing the number of sales interviews they have. Sales managers provide maximum value when they can identify these opportunities for explosive improvement.
Providing clear sales direction requires that sales managers narrow the focus for the sales team by translating company, regional, and branch business goals into specific target objectives, strategies, relationships and preferred behaviors for each employee.
Sales managers who keep a narrow focus can establish accountability for improvement and for getting done what needs to get done to accomplish the company’s goals.
Simplifying the mission for employees and explaining its importance builds employee engagement, and employee engagement is the best predictor of sales growth.
A great sales manager can impact an entire company’s success in selling by simply adopting a mindset of success and committing to the small, everyday changes that can lead to huge revenue growth. Salespeople look to sales managers to lead a cavalry charge in both behavior and in mindset.
Get your mindset right; get your sales up. It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
Call us today for a conversation about how Schneider Sales Management can support your organization’s 2019 sales goals.
