Articles

Getting it Right the First Try.

INTRODUCTION
Despite all the industry hype about "sales culture," few credit unions have become effective sales organizations. As a result, it's increasingly difficult for many credit unions to create enough capital through earnings to support their desired growth or to make the investments in technology required to support high levels of member service.

In a marketplace of shifting technology, new delivery networks, reduced member loyalty, and diminishing differentiation, there is considerable growth opportunity for those financial service organizations that can create sustainable and differentiated value for clients. To capitalize on this window of opportunity, a window that may be closing fast, credit unions need to embrace a new marketing focus. They must become organizationally competent at sales.

Banks are also notoriously poor at sales management, yet their investments in CRM and information technology, their investments in sales process, and their consolidation with other financial service providers who are good at sales such as brokerage firms and insurance companies have made it more difficult for credit unions to attract their high value clients.

Even the most sophisticated sales organizations in the banking, brokerage and insurance industries are asking, "what's next?" Many have implemented sales tracking, sales training and sales compensation systems, and they're looking for what's needed to move them to the next plateau of sales productivity.

Sales organizations don't manage themselves. Someone has to drive these marvelous chariots. Someone has to communicate the company's objectives, expectations, preferred way of selling, performance results, and rewards.

Sales management is actually management of a complex web of marketing and human resource issues that provide FOCUS and ACCOUNTABILITY for the selling effort. Most financial institutions manage sales as a series of continuing "events," not as an integrated climate of sales supports. As a result, sales and quality service never become institutionalized as priorities.

Integrated Sales Development Defined
A process for providing a common focus and accountability for all sales and sales support activities to achieve specific sales and member satisfaction objectives.

Most credit unions have implemented a wide variety of sales initiatives ranging from sales training to sales technology tools such as MCIF systems, yet very few believe they have achieved a high level of focus and accountability for their selling. The goal of integrated sales development is to coordinate each sales initiative to support and reinforce the other.

One measure of a successful sales process is the ability to sustain momentum for the process. Once a financial institution has made a commitment to becoming a sales-oriented organization, the next step is to put into place the people, the systems and the resources necessary to support the sales effort over the long haul.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what it takes to create and sustain a truly integrated sales development process. Specifically, this paper focuses on how credit union sales leaders can improve the effectiveness of their sales communication to create organizational focus and accountability for sales.

KEY ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL SALES DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
While many financial institutions have taken numerous action steps to build a more productive sales culture, few have committed to establishing a preferred way of selling that is consistent in reinforcing their business strategy. Too often, sales has been viewed as a short-term initiative, or as something to "check off" on the annual task list.

A December, 1999 study of 54 major banks by the Bank Administration Institute on best practices in sales management found a lack of "hands on" executive leadership in the sales development process to be the primary deterrent to success at medium-size and large financial institutions. Poor use of technology in supporting sales was the primary obstacle for smaller banks.

The process of cultural change necessary for developing a proactive sales culture is probably more difficult for credit unions than for most financial services companies. Many credit unions have operated in a relatively protected marketplace, and without the same urgency for profitability as their competitors. Conversely, the scale and member focus of most credit unions makes it easy for senior executives in most credit unions to provide the "hands on" sales leadership that can change an organization overnight to capitalize on the weakness of their competitors.

Typically, credit unions find these aspects of creating a sales development and member relationship management process most difficult:

• Holding employees accountable for sales results, including firing and promoting employees on the basis of their sales performance;
• Focusing discretionary resources on high value member households which some will argue strikes at the very heart of credit union philosophy;
• Moving fast. Unlike the evolutionary approach to sales take by bank competitors, credit unions can't afford to implement sales initiatives in a linear or methodical way. Change must come in quick bursts and quantum leaps, skipping most of the early developmental phases;
• Overcoming employee discomfort with sales behavior. Many credit union employees equate "good service' with waiting to take orders from members, and they view proactive efforts to determine member needs as intrusive.

Success in sales development is really about defining, teaching and sustaining desired employee behaviors. The focus of your sales development effort should be to get every employee to do and to say the right things that support your business strategy.

There are eight critical components that must be managed as an integrated process to support your business strategy. Later in this paper we'll discuss each component in detail. Each of these eight components of your sales process must work in concert with the others to support your business strategy.

THE SALES MANAGER'S ROLE IN SALES COMMUNICATION
At the center of the storm in managing this integrated sales process are the industry's new sales managers. By now, most credit unions have assigned accountability for managing sales. Sales managers may be branch managers, business development managers or managers of specific markets, product lines or non-traditional credit union products such as annuities. Many credit unions also have company or divisional sales managers.

Whatever their accountability, the primary role of the sales manager is sales communication. Companies communicate their values and expectations in everything they do, and in everything they don't do. It's the sales manager's job to see that the sales force gets the right signals and stays on course to meet the organization's financial objectives.

Managing sales requires managing people, gaining the willing cooperation of the many people who have an impact on sales effectiveness. People are the basic unit of sales excellence. Sales managers have to sell their ideas in the same way they sell their products. They have to "sell" selling and peak performance to the sales force.

New sales managers often struggle with the transition from player to coach. As sales managers, they're no longer judged exclusively on what they sell. Instead, they're judged on their ability to get sales results from other people. Their new role requires them to communicate with dozens of target audiences which have widely different objectives and to communicate the organization's expectations and performance consequences to the sales force.

Leadership is earned, not conferred. Success as a sales manager requires making time for communicating with the sales force.

For the sales manager, resolving even a small problem or distraction for a salesperson is often a higher priority than responding directly to members. If just one salesperson is distracted, the resulting drop in performance will affect dozens of members.

Most sales managers spend too much time supervising their employees and too little time supporting them. The only time most salespeople hear from their sales managers is when they foul up.

The best thing a sales manager can do to increase sales is to spend quality time with each salesperson looking for ways to support his/her selling. Anything a sales manager can do to support the sales force is important -- listening to them, encouraging them, anything.

The sales manager is the voice of the sales force. Sellers hold them accountable for meeting their needs. When sales managers free their salespeople from distractions, they free them for selling.

SELLING THE MISSION
Many sales organizations fail from lack of leadership. Sales management provides controls on the sales climate, but leadership adds the common vision that unleashes energy and motivation.

People do what you want done because they want to do it. They want to be led in pursuit of worthwhile goals. The desire to excel is the most important factor in sales success.

One of the sales manager's most important communication roles is relating the company's mission to each employee's goals. To inspire passion and extra effort, effective sales managers focus attention on a common cause that employees care about such as dedication to service and solving problems for members, or becoming the market leader. Having a mission helps employees adapt to change. It gives employees an overall plan with which they're familiar and to which they're committed.

The process of defining a mission for the sales force begins with gaining management's agreement on a statement of corporate goals for the sales effort which prioritizes what the sales force is setting out to achieve. In simple terms, this sales mission statement defines "success" for the sales effort.

In executing the company's sales plan, every sales manager runs up against the company's culture. Savvy sales managers learn to use the culture to communicate their mission.

Since most financial institutions have a strong service culture, and since many of their employees have fears about being viewed as "pushy salespeople" by their members, we've found it effective for sales managers to position selling in their sales communications as a step up in excellence in service. Good sales organizations don't avoid using the word "sales." They simply redefine selling as a helping process.

To solidify sales as a regular way of doing business rather than as a "program" that will eventually go away, sales should also be positioned in communications as a permanent, step-by-step process of serving members better. The goal is to foster a pervasive attitude that members come first and that selling is important, expected and the way to get rewarded.

TIPS FOR SELLING THE SALES MISSION
• Constantly use the word "sales" in communications.
• Integrate the company's marketing research data and strategic objectives with your sales training.
• Sell the sales force on rallying behind a competitive lead product that they really believe in.
• Name the sales process so employees won't label it as a "program."
• Emphasize sales and service expectations and values to new hires during their orientation.
• Assign senior executives a small portfolio of key members to contact periodically along with the assigned sales representative.
• Constantly remind everyone of what the organization believes in by pinpointing and magnifying select sales and service incidents in speeches and memos.
• Constantly stress value rather than price.
• Arrange for the CEO to spend time in highly visible sales activity such as making sales calls, attending sales meetings, reviewing sales reports, and meeting personally with top sales performers.

1. Job Clarity
Defining specific sales roles and accountabilities for each employee is a crucial first step. Without clearly defined accountabilities, it's virtually impossible to recruit the right people, to define measures or goals, to provide the right training, or to hold employees accountable. Even worse, poor job clarity results in conflicting priorities.

Clearly written job descriptions and minimum sales and service performance standards are a good start to providing job clarity. Spell out specific sales tasks and sales coaching and relationship management responsibilities for each job role, and tell employees in writing the minimum level of performance that you are willing to accept.

Use a separate document for sales and service minimum standards. The minimum standards document should describe specific job related activities, behaviors, and performance expectations for each position, and should be reviewed and updated on an annual basis as position requirements change.

Sales managers need to say "I want" and "I expect" when it comes to performance. People don't hear you when you hint. Standards can be established for such performance factors as sales results, product knowledge and service behavior at the various "moments of truth" in service delivery. These standards can be written into job descriptions, performance appraisals, job aids, dress codes, service quality shopper programs, and service quality handbooks.

Once good performance is clearly defined, coaching becomes primarily goal setting and feedback.

For sales leaders, set clear expectations for sales management responsibilities including setting goals, conducting observation coaching and conducting sales meetings. Review your organization chart to ensure that there are clear functional lines of authority and accountability for sales coaching and for member relationship development.

Clear accountability is crucial to sales motivation. When sellers are confused about priorities, they donÕt commit themselves to achieving anything, and when conditions and expectations change fast as they do during a merger or during the transition to a strong sales climate, employees look for even more clarity.

Sales managers first communicate this accountability in the way they organize their staff for selling.

When a sales manager organizes selling so branch managers who don't have a strong second tier of management in their branches are expected to do substantial outside calling plus manage in-branch sales and operations, neither job gets done well. When branches are organized so first line supervisors don't function visibly as supervisors with employees and members, service quality drops dramatically. When institutions operate without a separate, dedicated sales force for new business development, or for the sale of complicated or non-traditional products, sellers are frequently nonproductive.

The fastest payoff on defining sales accountability results from assigning accountability for retention and development of the 10-15% of members and referral sources who product 80-90% of the organization's profits.

Relationship management is the rising star of sales management. However, its ultimate effectiveness as a concept requires success in personal selling. Smart sales managers are following the lead of companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard by identifying high value member relationships and assigning member portfolios to individual sellers so these members can receive extra sales attention. In general, these portfolios are best assigned on the basis of dollars under management and potential for development, as opposed to current profitability.

The sales manager's first impression in communicating sales accountability is the position description used in hiring and in explaining responsibilities to employees. For most financial institutions, these position descriptions communicate few, if any, accountabilities for selling. For many positions the word "sales" isn't even used in the position description, and position descriptions frequently treat all selling positions as if they have the same sales accountabilities. They don't.

For example, if tellers interpret their accountability as completing sales, they won't even try to sell because they know they don't have time in a brief transaction to sort out a member's objectives, describe the product and close the sale. Their sales role should be clearly defined as sales referral.

To communicate accountabilities even more clearly, sales managers may want to assign new position titles such as account executive, relationship manager, service manager, or sales manager to many jobs to communicate stronger sales accountabilities and to enhance the seller's credibility with members.

2. Recruiting & Selection of People
Not everyone can be a high performing seller. A person's personality and experience may not fit the type of selling that he/she is being asked to do. As a result, sales managers in most industries view recruiting employees who can sell as their first priority. The "200 Watt" salesperson will always shine a lot brighter than the "60 Watt" salesperson. Good hiring decisions minimize the company's required investment in training and coaching, produce higher productivity, and improve team morale.

In a true sales environment, recruiting is everyone's responsibility. Sales supervisors should be held accountable for recruiting and front-line employees should always be on the lookout for potential employees who they would want as co-workers.

One of the keys to successful recruiting is to recruit prospective employees even when you are not currently hiring. The idea is to have a "pipeline" of prospective employees who have already expressed an interest in working for you. This will shorten hiring cycles and take the pressure off hiring managers so they are not inclined to hire anyone just to fill staff openings.

Psychological research of thousands of salespeople has demonstrated that the one factor that consistently correlates with high sales productivity is a person's personality "fit" with what he/she is actually expected to do in selling. Age, gender, sales or banking experience, and other factors commonly emphasized in financial industry recruiting have little to do with success in selling.

The national research that we have done with the University of Colorado Business School in salesperson selection in the financial services industry has identified eight widely different selling roles in financial institutions. In addition, salespeople may also need to be assessed for their potential for sales leadership as a sales manager.

Success in each of the eight types of financial industry selling requires different personal attributes, and the people who perform well in each of these selling roles have different motivation and require different communication strategies in training, coaching, reward and motivation. For example, a service seller such as a teller may be strongly motivated by helping members or by belonging to a successful team, whereas a competitive seller such as a commissioned investment representative may be more motivated by immediate dollar rewards and personal recognition as a "superseller."

Surprisingly, part-time employees frequently rank among the leaders in financial industry sales. This is further evidence of the importance of sales personality relative to experience.

Sales managers should first define what sales behavior they expect from people in each sales position. Next, they should identify the people who are currently peak performers in those sales roles and develop their selection criteria based on the profile of those peak performers, particularly their personality, experience, and "fit" with the culture of the organization and with the audience to whom they sell.

Sales managers also have to communicate their sales force needs to the human resources staff. The more precise sales managers are about what they want, the more effective human resources personnel can be in supporting them. They can help develop job descriptions, recruiting ads and recruiting brochures that will help attract the right applicants and pre-sell them on your company.

Many of your best potential salespeople can be found inside your organization in positions that donÕt fit their strengths. By posting new sales positions and profiling employees by personality, you can identify people with sales personality and interest in selling by self-selection and "refit" them to the sales positions for which they're best suited.

Sales managers also need to communicate a career path that will attract and keep good salespeople. Financial institutions tend to hire personnel for entry sales positions such as tellers and promote these people through a one-dimensional career track to higher levels of selling such as member service representatives or branch manager. Since each of these types of selling requires a different sales personality and different competencies, the best sellers in these categories eventually move to other companies so they can make more money doing what they do best, or they leave branch sales for other job categories.

IDEAS FOR EXPANDING YOUR APPLICANT BASE THROUGH PROACTIVE RECRUITING
• Develop and maintain an employee referral program that compensates existing employees when they refer a prospective employee who is hired by the company. Pay more for tough-to-hire positions such as frontline sales management or call center telemarketers.
• Hold recruiting events and job fairs. If your company is not big enough to attract attention in the local market, co-sponsor the event with several other non-competing employers.
•Hold recruiting "blitzes" or short company-wide contests to generate applicant referrals. One financial institution filled over 20 job openings in one week by conducting an all-out company-wide applicant referral blitz.
• Develop and distribute a recruiting brochure for a career in sales with your company. Sell the opportunities for learning about business and computers, the wide variety of sales positions available, opportunities for sales training, and easy access to sales leads.
• Target successful employees at other employers with strong sales and service reputations such as Nordstroms, Macy's, or local financial institutions with a solid record of developing top talent.
• Incorporate employee recruiting into the job requirements and performance reviews of sales supervisors.

IDEAS TO STRENGTHEN YOUR INTERVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS
• Conduct a pre-screen telephone interview by your HR Representative and a sales profiling test before inviting the applicant for a face-to-face interview.
• Use only profiling tests that attempt to fit the person to a specific selling role. Avoid tests that evaluate personality only.
• Conduct multiple interviews. Have each applicant interview with a human resources representative or recruiter, the immediate supervisor, the supervisor's next-higher manager, and a prospective peer. For example, if you are interviewing for a member service representative, have one of your best representatives interview the finalists for the position.
• Have all finalists undergo a telephone interview with their probable supervisor. Many sales positions require extensive telephone contact with members and you need to know how well prospective employees can sell themselves on the telephone.
• Evaluate each candidate's ability to handle typical sales and service scenarios. Give candidates case studies or situations to evaluate and respond to in role play.

In spite of your best efforts during the interview process to identify top performers and weed out candidates likely to fail, you'll make some mistakes. To compensate for these mistakes, install a demanding sales orientation for new hires that will serve as an extension of your interview process and weed out low performers. The best performers like to know that they've joined an organization that has high expectations and that will prepare them to succeed.

3. Creating a Focused Action Plan
Of all the dimensions of sales communication, none has more impact on sales force motivation than goal setting. Goals provide the foundation for sales action plans by providing a sales organization with focus and accountability.

Salespeople who have goals consistently out-perform those who don't. Goals increase motivation by making it possible for employees to succeed more often, and by encouraging self-management. The focus of attention provided by goal setting increases commitment to achieve the goals.

Goals should be challenging enough to motivate people to extra effort and realistic enough to provide frequent opportunities for success without your having to soften accountability for goal achievement.

The difference in behavior between peak performance and average performance is small. Generally, the higher the goals, the better the performance. When goals are set too low, sales managers actually reinforce poor performance.

Improvement is the objective of goal setting. Expect progress, not perfection. ItÕs more motivating for sellers to compete against themselves than to compete against others.

Sales goals should be both measurable and "sales specific" which means they must be within the seller's control to achieve by a specific date on the basis of his/her effort, regardless of changes in interest rates or marketing support.

Once goals have been set, a sales manager's most important role in goal management just begins. Sales managers need to constantly remind sellers of their progress against their goals. When sales managers frequently check progress against goals, sales force motivation and performance improves.

TIPS FOR SETTING GOALS THAT WILL BE PERCEIVED AS REALISTIC, FAIR AND MOTIVATING
• Provide employees with historical performance data to support recommended goal levels
• Negotiate goals with sales unit managers and employees to the extent possible
• Customize goals based on market area potential
• Customize goals based on individual skills, experience, and opportunity
• Limit goal categories to no more than 3-5 per employee. Too many goal categories will overwhelm employees.

Our experience with a wide variety of financial service sales organizations has proven that salespeople are much more likely to meet their sales goals if they work from a 90 day action plan. Your 90 day action plan format should focus employees on three specific numerical sales objectives each quarter that support their annual goals, on specific strategies and activities to support these objectives, and on three specific skill improvement goals.

Your 90 day action plans should also be supported by weekly sales plans that focus the time and efforts of employees on their best immediate sales opportunities. By narrowing the focus of each salesperson prior to his/her weekly sales activity, sales leaders can achieve more leverage in directing their salespeople to the right prospects with the right sales objectives and strategies.

4. Training and Skill Certification
The objective of training is to make people behave the same in some way that's important to good performance. With regard to sales, the objective is to establish a repeatable, Preferred Way of Selling¨ for your organization that will increase your sales success rate and provide a benchmark for coaching and accountability.

For most credit unions, this best practices selling model must be a member focused way of selling that supports your business strategy such as our copyrighted continuous sales flow diagram shown below.

In golf, 75% of the game is putting and hitting short shots. Most golfers, however, spend most of their time practicing their driving. The same is true for selling. 75% of selling is about getting information, yet most sales training focuses on giving information.

As suggested by the Preferred Way of Selling¨ diagram, sales organizations should provide "how to" training on the following skill sets which represent a continuous flow of member focused selling behavior:

FOCUS - Focus your thinking outward on helping your member and focus your selling on the right prospects for whom you have the best opportunities to add value.

CONNECT - Be proactive in making contact to help members and in adjusting your approach to establish trust, interest and difference.

PROFILE - Ask questions to profile the member's objectives, relationships, interests, potential and buying criteria.

COUNSEL - Guide your member to appropriate solutions with your questions and your advice.

ADVANCE - Help the member take appropriate next step action and follow-up to build the relationship.

Once employees have completed classroom training, require them to undergo a sales and relationship management skill certification process that forces them to use these new skills, and requires them to demonstrate their mastery of preferred behaviors.

Most important, allocate more of your training dollars to sales management skills which give you the greatest return on your training dollar. Most line sales leaders simply don't have the "how to" skills to provide specific coaching direction to their salespeople.

Sales leader training should include training on conducting sales meetings, negotiating goals with individual employees, communicating expectations, coaching employees on preferred selling skills and strategies, developing sales plans (90 day action plans and weekly sales plans), and conducting sales performance evaluations.

Who should conduct sales training? Our clients have had their best results with a small "swat" team of branch managers and top performing salespeople teaching the fundamentals of selling after receiving training in group leadership skills. There seems to be "magic" in the sales leader taking accountability for the results of his/her sales force. For advanced sales training and for new hire sales training, top performing sales organizations such as IBM often rotate their best sales managers and salespeople as sales training instructors so their strategies, attitudes and values can be modeled for new hires.

Your best sales performers should actually receive more sales training than other sellers. You simply get a better payoff on your training investment in terms of increased sales production.

Sales managers should also see that all member contact employees receive at least a mini-version of the institution's basic sales training course so everyone will communicate with members and with each other from the same member-based point of view.

Sales training communication begins the day that a new employee reports to work. Very few financial institutions are as demanding in what they expect of new hires during orientation as firms in other industries. A demanding first few weeks of employment weeds out salespeople who aren't serious about achievement, and good salespeople like to enter a demanding climate because they feel they're being well prepared to succeed at selling.

5. Measurements & Feedback
Our national surveys of financial institution salespeople consistently demonstrate that employees would like more frequent feedback from their managers regarding their job performance, and that supervisory feedback is a significant motivator in improving employee results. If you're going to increase accountability for sales, it's only fair that you provide more opportunity for employees to improve.

One of the reasons why managers are reluctant to give their employees feedback on their sales performance is that the performance measures themselves are often out of alignment with the company's business strategy. For example, most credit unions are refocusing their sales efforts on relationship management of high value members and on obtaining new members yet most are using short-term transactional measures such as cross-sale ratios rather than dollars under management, core product sales and new member acquisition.

The trend among leading sales organizations is toward use of a balanced scorecard of performance measures such as core product sales, dollar growth in assigned member portfolio, and new members acquired. For supervisors, this scorecard should also include skill development among their employees.

Supervisors should provide feedback to employees on their selling at least weekly, and formal reviews should be conducted quarterly with the completion of 90-day action plans. Make it easy for employees to track their own progress by providing tracking reports on all goal categories and management reports that rank employee performance in key goal categories. The "once annually" review process most organizations have grown comfortable with just doesn't work.

COMMUNICATION TIPS FOR SALES TRACKING
• Sell sales tracking as the basis for reward, even naming the sales report the "sales achievement report."
• When you train managers and sellers how to record sales data, train them how to interpret and use the reports.
• Provide each seller with his/her own monthly report of sales performance and incentive earnings to increase motivational impact.
• Stress effectiveness, not activity.
• Report progress toward goals as well as current sales.
• From the date of your first report, ask sellers to use their reports to set and graph weekly step-by-step improvement goals such as "sell five CD's with checking accounts."
• Review the reports to identify which products sell best with which other products and train the sales force to key on those add-on sales opportunities.
• Require sales managers to schedule a brief meeting with each salesperson to review their sales reports the day the reports are received.

Most institutions with advanced sales climates prepare sales progress charts for their sales units and post the scores publicly, fast and frequently. The impact of this performance tracking is even more powerful when those results are broken into smaller goals for the activities and interim results that lead to goal achievement, and when salespeople record their own progress toward short-term improvement goals.

The simple graphing of progress from a baseline record of performance toward a goal encourages self-management and provides immediate feedback to sellers when the sales manager can't be there.

6. Strategy & Skills Coaching
The most important sales communications for sales managers are those they deliver in coaching their employees.

As much as 90% of changes in selling skill brought about by sales training and sales meeting are lost without follow-up coaching. Coaching is the one sales communication that can reach the sales manager's employees several times a day, every day.

As with other skills such as swimming or tennis, few people get better at selling without the benefit of being observed and receiving constructive feedback and coaching. In our sales assessment surveys nationwide, employees of financial institutions tell us overwhelmingly that they want to set improvement goals and to receive coaching. They also tell us that they're not actually being coached despite an industry-wide emphasis on coaching in the business plans of most financial institutions.

There are three primary reasons why coaching doesn't occur: a) sales leaders are not rewarded for their development of their staff b) there is more discomfort with giving feedback among sales leaders than there is discomfort with selling among salespeople; and c) most sales leaders don't know how to coach.

Coaching based on the numbers in a sales report really isn't skill development. The best way to coach the development of selling skills is to role play with an employee or to observe an employee's behavior with members and provide constructive feedback. Nationwide about 5% of financial institution employees report that they have received this type of coaching within the past month.

Skills coaching can take many forms - discussion and role play during sales meetings, direct observation of your employees while they are selling, monitoring of phone calls, and peer coaching by coworkers. But to make it happen, it must be a required, documented process.

Effective sales managers stay with their coaching long enough to develop habit. Five coaching contacts on one behavior is frequently more effective than one coaching contact on each of five behaviors.

To make their sales communications stick, sales managers should become comfortable with three types of skill coaching: quick coaching, observation coaching, and partner coaching.

Quick coaching is reaching an employee with feedback immediately after observing his/her actions. About 80% of quick coaching should be devoted to reinforcing what people do right. Sales managers in financial institutions tend to spend too much time with the bottom 20% of salespeople trying to turn performance around, and not enough time reinforcing the every day successes of middle and peak performers.

Observation coaching is providing opportunities for employees to watch the sales manager or someone else sell correctly, or providing opportunities for the seller to practice while the sales manager observes and critiques. The key to observation coaching is telling employees what behavior to work on prior to the coaching contact.

Partner coaching is matching peers together to form a two person or larger support group for encouragement, learning and reinforcement. Employees can give faster, more frequent feedback to each other than the sales manager can give them, and shared goal setting and peer pressure increase motivation.

In all these forms of coaching, the key sales communication strategy is self-evaluation by the employee so the sales manager can minimize defensiveness.

With regard to coaching to influence a salesperson's strategy, the best coaching practices require a PROCESS such as negotiating relationship goals, requiring weekly sales plans that detail prospect selection, reviewing client action objectives for important sales contacts, and reviewing the progress of specific prospects through your sales pipeline.

Sales meetings provide an additional forum for both skills coaching and strategy coaching. The trouble is, most sales managers don't know what they want them to achieve, and so the benefits of their sales meetings are short lived, reducing them to short-term motivators. Sales meetings can range from "big events" like renting a sports stadium to the five minute stand-up huddle each day behind the teller counter. They may take the form of annual meetings for the entire sales force, quarterly regional sales meetings, weekly branch or calling officer sales meetings, or periodic top performance or new product sales meetings. Whatever form they take, sales meetings need an objective, a reason for being.

Why hold a sales meeting? The primary objectives of sales meetings are to recognize and reward success, to establish clear goals and expectations, to keep the "mission" alive, and to share sales strategies that are working. Sales meetings also help to share new information, to develop product knowledge and competition knowledge, to get feedback from the sales force, to solve problems, to generate enthusiasm and to reinforce selling skills.

For most purposes, sales meetings should be held separately from other meetings or sales will soon take a back seat to day-to-day operations problems.

Sales managers don't hold sales meetings for the simple reasons that they don't know what to say and they don't have time to research and develop what to say. They're too busy selling. The solution is for corporate sales managers to preprogram sales meetings for field sales managers in brief sales meeting guides.

To make sales meetings more interesting, your sales meeting guides should encourage maximum employee participation in discussing current sales topics. The worst abuses of sales meetings are one-way presentations that give no participation or leadership role to the sellers themselves.

7. Information and Sales Support
No matter how good your organization becomes at the skills of selling, your ability to sustain a quantum leap in sales will also depend on how well you support your salespeople. By far the most important issue of support is to create a sales manager role for the company and/or for selected sales units or markets to provide continuing focus and accountability for sales.

Here are a few additional areas of support that can have substantial impact on sales productivity:
• Increase the amount of time your employees have available to sell by eliminating or streamlining work activities, centralizing operations and servicing tasks, sequencing computer screens to flow with your preferred sales process, and reducing nonproductive meeting time;
• Provide easily accessible information to direct employees to the right prospects such as sales lead lists, top member or prospect lists, and high value member information;
• Develop products with unique features that provide easy differentiation.
• Provide easy access to product, client and computer information to salespeople at the point of sale through the use of a company intranet.
• Provide sales aids and computer capabilities that help employees get information and personalize their presentations as opposed to giving information.
• Build the capability to gather, store and recall information on every member's product usage, utilization of service channels, preferred buying behaviors, lifestyle indicators, financial profile, and credit worthiness.
• Train employees on the understanding of predictive sales indicators that translate member information and behavior into what the member is likely to want or need next.

Finally, don't rely on that MCIF system, contact management software, or new platform system you recently installed to increase sales. Technology won't automatically change employee sales behavior, and giving employees great information on a timely basis won't do any good unless they know what to do with it. Be sure to provide employees with the "how to" skill building to use technology, or your employees will simply be bypassing sales screens and avoiding interaction with your MCIF or other data mining tools to save time.

8. Accountability and Consequences
Without accountability there are no consequences for performance, good or bad. Accountability simply means that line supervisors monitor behavior and performance against goal and provide constructive feedback. Consequences are what happens as a result of performance.

To build a high producing sales organization, you must be willing to define unacceptable performance and to remove or refit nonperformers. If you don't, you'll lose your top producers and, with them, much of your sales production.

The secret to quality service is tough standards and supervision, not "smile training." First line supervisors are the key link in service delivery because they're the people who communicate the values and standards of the organization day in and day out. When you receive good service, you almost always notice a highly visible supervisor on premises.

Frequently, salespeople don't do what their sales managers want them to do because they think they're doing it. Without standards that provide clear direction, people make their own assumptions about what's expected of them. As a result, they're likely to run the same "wrong plays" over and over. The sales force "levels down" to the lowest comfortable standard of behavior; peer pressure ceases to exist; and sales managers find it almost impossible to weed out low performers.

Sales managers can provide effective motivational "hype" in their sales communications all year long, but when employees have their performance appraisals and their salary reviews and hear little or nothing about sales and goal achievement, the organization communicates clearly that sales is not a priority.

One of the sales manager's key sales communication tasks is to sell the perception that pay and performance are linked. When sales managers fail at this, they quickly lose their best sellers.

Having said that, most gains in sales performance are won with positive consequences such as supervisory feedback, compensation and recognition. Of these, good supervision of a preferred sales process is by far the most influential factor. We've seen many organizations achieve superior results with average salespeople on the strength of good supervision.

Sales performance is largely the result of the consequences of selling behavior. Behavior that is reinforced by consequences which sellers will work hard to repeat tends to continue or to increase, and sales behavior that is ignored or punished by consequences which sellers will work hard to avoid tends to decrease.

For salespeople, performance feedback is clearly "the breakfast of champions." Sellers have a strong need for recognition of their successes so they can sustain their motivation in the face of rejection, resistance and dips and plateaus in performance. Some successful sales organizations such as Mary Kay Cosmetics were built on the strength of their recognition programs.

Sales managers whose sellers hit a plateau in sales results often can get substantial increases in sales simply by increasing their feedback to sellers on "normal expected" behavior in a 4:1 ratio of rewards to reprimands. People will work harder and longer for praise than for anything else.

Salespeople will move mountains for recognition, but the criteria for recognition must be clear. The biggest mistake in the design of recognition programs is to reward only the "winners." In this structure, everyone other than a few top performers give up as soon as its clear that they won't win. A better structure is recognize all achievement that meets established criteria, plus top performers.

With regard to sales compensation, the objective is to reward incremental performance above expected performance. Otherwise your compensation plan won't be cost effective.

Sales compensation should also vary by selling role. You might choose to pay an investment representative largely with variable compensation based on the salesperson's importance to the sale and the pure prospecting nature of the job, but a member service representative who has a lot of servicing and team interaction will be demotivated by a high proportion of variable compensation.

Most sales organizations today are replacing volume sales incentives with a balanced scorecard approach that attaches weighted payouts to 3-4 key measures such as core production, client portfolio growth, and client satisfaction based on the employee's job function and the market. For most positions there is an individual performance component and a small team performance component.

Finally, if you have a limited budget for sales incentives we strongly urge you to consolidate those dollars to create a strong compensation plan for sales supervisors. If theyÕre motivated, they'll find a way to motivate others.

GIVE YOUR ORGANIZATION THE FEEL OF SUCCESS¨
Developing a sales organization is simple, but it's not easy. A quick assessment of your organization's effectiveness in integrating the eight components of sales management will tell you which steps are next in priority for your organization. That's simple. The difficult part is gaining the commitment of your line sales leaders to reinforce your Preferred Way of Selling¨ every month, every week, every day.

If you can give your organization a repeatable process for success in selling, you can give every employee in your organization The Feel of Success¨.

Schneider Sales Management Inc.
5340 S Quebec Street, Suite 265N
Greenwood Village, Colorado 80111
Phone: (303)221-4511
Fax: (303)221-4650
Email: info@schneidersales.com

Copyright 2006, Schneider Sales Management, Inc.
All Rights Reserved

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