Recently David Kerstein, President, Peak Performance Consulting Group and Buck Bierly, President, MZ Bierly Consulting conducted a series of 3 webinars designed to help branch managers and retail leaders develop best-in-class sales practices. This is an excerpt from webinar #2.
For more information, or to register for access to the archive version of these webinars please contact dkerstein@ppcgroup.com
David Kerstein:
What we’re looking at on this slide is an actual job description currently posted for a personal banker by one of the top ten banks. I won’t read it all through but this is word-for-word, job description for a personal banker.
Think about how it emphases some of the things that we’ve talked about today.
“Your role is to build long-term relationships, to go out into the community and call on clients and businesses.” This is for a personal banker!
“To meet and exceed your goals, to acquire 100% of the customer’s business, use profiling tools to identify cross-sale opportunities, manage your scorecard, pitch in and help others work with them to enhance their ability.”
In other words, identify opportunities for referrals to other parts of the bank.
“To work as part of a team and help it be more successful.”
It is not only that we’ll provide training, but it’s up to you to learn our products. In other words, not all of the burden is on us to give you that consistent product knowledge — you have to take an active role so that you’re educated in terms of what you need for your customers.
If you think about this in terms of a guide, in terms of setting expectations, some of the things that we talked about are some of the things that many financial institutions and many of the larger ones are trying to embed into their process.
If you look now at the next slide, I want to talk about the idea that sometimes simple is better and I would tell you that I’ve got a very simple way of being able to tell whether a branch has a strong sales culture.
If I walk into the break room and I look to see if there is a whiteboard or some chart in terms of how this branch is doing, so that everybody gets that information. They don’t have to look up the reports and try to understand them. They see it visually immediately, as you can see from the examples on this slide.
And what I always liked about the whiteboards is that it is a simple technique that you can implement for just a few dollars — buy and put up a whiteboard in your branch.
As a sales person, when I make a sale, I go in and I update how I did, how I contributed to that branch, how we’re moving the goals forward. Buck walks in to get a cup of coffee and he sees that I made some extra sales and it might motivate him or he might ask me, “What did you do? How did you do that?”
This way everyone see how they are contributing to that overall branch goal. You can see some great examples here in these pictures.
So, sometimes, simple ways of doing this, of building that teamwork, are highly effective in terms of creating those incentives and recognition and the team participation that gets your branch where you need it to go.
Buck Bierly:
And that means that you don’t have to have elaborate sales reporting. You don’t have to have excessive contact management or CRM-type systems. You can do this very simply starting tomorrow. Very good.
David:
Exactly. You don’t have to wait for all of that to be in place.
Buck:
That’s right. So, let’s summarize here if we could, okay?
David:
So, the top take-aways.
It’s about building deep relationships, not just selling more products.
Sustained performance requires a disciplined process. Who do we call on? What do we do? How do we measure success? And then finally, it’s not just about training. It’s about consistent coaching and follow-up, it’s getting the right people in place.
It’s about transmitting best practices. How can we learn and continue to improve as an organization?
And it’s about recognizing the behavior that is moving us forward and achieving success. It’s not just about giving people a bigger paycheck, it’s about recognizing their performance and encouraging people who are doing the kinds of things that are helping your organization to be successful.
So, with that, Buck, let me turn it back to you and I know you want to talk about the next webinar that we have coming up.
Buck:
We do. And you know, before we leave this though, I just want to make sure that people are hearing some of the things that you said so carefully here and that is, there are a couple of things you can do, starting tomorrow, which do not require extensive training, do not extensive electronics or technology or anything.
One is to start changing the conversation. Giving your people a few questions they can answer go beyond product features.
Number two, think about relationship profiling. If you’ve never seen a relationship profile, send us an email and we will send you one of the consumer relationship profiles that our clients use and you could take a look at it and say, “Gee whizz, could we start asking these kinds of questions?” Not all at once, but over a period of time.
And here’s the third thing, an onboarding process that has a heavy focus on the first month and the first year and we stay in front of these people proactively and we measure that stuff using a whiteboard in the break room.
I mean these are incredibly simple things to do that have a huge impact.
If you’re not doing these things, think about putting them in place because if your team is focused and your team is performing well, it frees up your time as a branch manager to get out on the streets and go after those highly-profitable small businesses relationships.
Recently David Kerstein, President, Peak Performance Consulting Group and Buck Bierly, President, MZ Bierly Consulting conducted a series of 3 webinars designed to help branch managers and retail leaders develop best-in-class sales practices. This is an excerpt from webinar #2.
For more information, or to register for access to the archive version of these webinars please contact dkerstein@ppcgroup.com
David Kerstein:
First of all, you need to have a plan. Not every branch has the same opportunities. And so one thing that we encourage is having a process for putting together a plan based on the trade-area potential.
You know, we look at branches that are doing well and management will often say, “Oh, we don’t need to worry about those guys.” But oftentimes, what’s occurring there is that that branch is doing well because they have a very strong trade area and they could be doing even better.
Then we have others that are struggling to be able to be successful, and they’re actually doing quite well against a trade area that has only limited upside potential.
So, have a plan and put in place daily and weekly and monthly routines for what specifically you need to do to capture the business opportunity. Measure results, and give individual and team feedback, so that they can continue to improve upon their performance.
Buck Bierly:
So this is way, way beyond just giving somebody a monthly goal or a quarterly goal or an annual goal? This comes down to establishing daily routines: let’s each do at least one relationship profile today; let’s make three onboarding calls today. And this gets down to, what you’re doing every single day to build this out and then watching as the results.
David:
Exactly.
And so, here’s a short chart that shows the development of a sales-orientated culture. I know, Buck, that you’ve shown this a number of times in your presentations as a kind of a timeline for building a sales culture. Things as simple as what each branch needs to do daily, weekly and monthly for managing their process.
One of the things that I would encourage people to look at is peer cross-training, which is often undervalued or under-emphasized in many organizations. You need to have this cross-fertilization across your organization in terms of best practices, in terms of peers learning from peers and helping each other.
It’s not all up to you as a manager — it’s up to you getting the right people in place and getting the right people paired up to be able to learn from each other and continuously improve rather than feeling that you have to consistently give all the answers. It’s looking for the people who’ve got the right process and being able to translate that throughout your organization.
Buck:
We see that in every, single, high-performing branch I’ve ever been involved with, is the branch manager setting up that kind of peer cross-training. You are spot-on from what I’ve seen.
Let me just say one other thing. Hey guys on the phone, if you use this for a checklist, “Am I doing this in my branch?” Or, “Do I have someone in my branch doing this with me or for me so that I can free up some time to get out of the branch.” Now, we’re starting to make some progress.
I’d encourage you use this as a checklist, “How well am I doing at each of these daily, weekly and monthly things?” And if you’re doing all this stuff and you’re not getting the results, then you can say to yourself, “I’ve got to make some adjustments.” But this is a great checklist of what we should be doing.
What happens when non customers use your ATMs? Do you try to convert them into bank customers?
Here’s what came up on my screen when I used a Wells Fargo ATM while travelling in California.
Here are the simple facts: by the end of this decade there will be 40% fewer banks and 50% fewer credit unions.
Think we’re being overdramatic?
The number of banks declined from 18,000 in 1984 to 7,377 at year end 2011. By end of 2020 there will only be 4,490.
The consolidation of credit unions is even more dramatic — virtually a straight line for the past 27 years. There were 15,193 in 1984 but only 7,036 at the end of 2011. This number will drop to 3,500 in 2020.
6,423 banks and credit unions will disappear over the next 8 years. The real question is not whether the industry will consolidate at this rapid rate, but whether you will be a survivor.
Not too long ago, banks were asking whether they really should invest in Internet banking. Now many are raising the same questions about consumer remote deposit. As my daughter would say, “I don’t get it!”
Our youngest daughter grew up in Vietnam and joined our family when she was 8 years old. She learned English quickly, but understanding idioms and some of our illogical customs remained challenging.
A few months after she joined us, we took her to summer camp along with the rest of her siblings. “It will be fun,” we told her.
She looked around.
“No air conditioning? No TV?”
“I have to share a room with 12 other girls, sleep on an upper bunk, and eat in the dining hall with 100 other people?”
“You have to pay for this?”
“I don’t get it!”
Here’s what I don’t get the reluctance of many banks to adopt consumer remote deposit capture (scanning checks or taking photos on their smartphone and transmitting them to the bank).
A few weeks ago I listened to a presentation by USAA, Chase, and others, about their Consumer RDC strategy.
USAA explained how 35% of deposits now come through remote capture. They explained how they could specifically attribute a 10% increase in total deposit growth to this channel, and how they had plans to continue to grow consumer Remote Deposit to 65% of total. Both USAA and Chase explained how fraud was lower than expected and articulated some of their fraud control techniques. They talked about how the duplicate check problem was really not a problem.
There were lots of questions – mostly about risk.
So I was thinking:
“Consumers become their own proof operators and send checks directly to you, fully imaged.”
“Fraud is lower than regular check deposits.”
“Consumers like this channel, and move their relationship to banks that offer it.”
“But you are still worried, and are holding back because you prefer to have customers take their checks to high cost branches with expensive tellers.”
“I don’t get it!”
Every year SNL financial publishes a survey of in-store banking trends, and they are kind enough to seek our opinion — and give us credit for a few quotes!
At most banks, in-store (supermarket) banking has not fulfilled its’ promise of “one-third the income with one-fifth the expense”. But there is a way to crack the code.
Think about the potential for small specialty branches, similar to in-store, that would allow you to pinpoint special markets. Apply these concepts to create low cost distribution at high value targets such as office campuses, hospitals, employer headquarters, densely packed urban neighborhoods, and other similar venues.
Think about the facilities design and staffing. These are not just a standard branch shrunk smaller — it needs an entirely different operating model.
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