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Team Selling

This is another article in the series offering ideas for organic growth and profitability improvement during these difficult times.

Banks have been bemoaning their silos for decades. Each line of business optimizes to its own bottom line, whichever way that is defined, which sub-optimizes the entire company and makes it confusing for the customers, who must search for separate solutions in every line of business.

Management wants more collaboration across businesses, but the successful ones are reluctant to share their precious customers, which they worked so hard to capture and retain, with someone else who might mess the relationship up, upset the apple-cart, and possibly lose the relationship altogether. Why take the risk when things are going swimmingly as it is?

It will take an executive management edict to change this mindset, and a structured, disciplined team selling process to change reality.

The goal: incremental cross-selling revenue otherwise not achieved (without this process), producing a minimum $100K a year, with $500K a year being a good goal for first year. In order to accomplish this, you must establish a disciplined process with executive management oversight and specific leading and lagging indicator expectations. Letting the process take its own shape will not yield the expected results in most cases. It will be necessary to:

  • Find executive sponsors
  • Allow team leads select their own team
  • Focus on specific market segments, e.g. health care
  • Force people to work together. This will be facilitated by formulating clear meeting expectations. These meeting should be held at least monthly for one hour with full attendance mandated.
  • Expect everyone to bring leads (at least 2 per person per meeting)
  • Expect all team members to have conversational competence regarding product knowledge
  • Co-locate team members
  • Encourage team-based customer events
  • Provide education to the team as a group. This should include sales management techniques such as The Wedge, opportunity identification, and closing techniques
  • Organize teams geographically, rather than based on legacy
  • Have a structured discussion around every lead: pros, cons and whats best for the client
  • Report monthly to the team and executive management, and report stack ranks the teams
  • Hold a quarterly meeting of all team members at which the top teams are recognized
  • Create incentives for team-generated revenues in addition to counting all revenues against each LOB goals
  • Create incentives for teams that exceed their 100% goal
  • Allow team members to decide not to give incentives to a non-contributing member

There are several benefits to such a system. The incremental revenues garnered are certainly a plus, for one. For another, the bank will own the relationship with the client, and as a result will be less vulnerable to individual departure. The fact that an entire team is working on the sale will reduce individual anxiety. And, perhaps best of all, customer satisfaction and retention will improve meaningfully. First National Bank of Nebraska effectively implemented this program (now on its third year) with meaningful incremental revenue results.

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FOOD NOTES

This column will offer fool proof recipes, restaurant suggestions and other foodie tidbits for your consideration and consumption.

You can find more tasty recipes in the Recipe Archive