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Continued from page 2
Through their sales plans, effective sales managers provide a systematic
process for defining the winning strategies. First and second line
managers, in conjunction with their sales staff, must then optimize
their scarce resources to obtain profitable sales in local markets.
Sales plans and management training provide the blueprint for success.
From this blueprint come the management routines necessary to sustain
focused sales effort and a sales culture mindset. Management routines
become habit when used consistently. Routines, such as goal setting,
sales meetings, coaching, tracking, training, and other forms of
organization support are the tools for managing the resources to
execute success. The sales blueprint provides the logic and rationale
behind each key activity and therefore the framework and benchmarks
to review to ensure continued use of best practices and corrections
in strategy as needed. To sustain a sales culture, sales managers
must provide the road map for achieving annual goals. By managing
against this road map, sales managers can focus sales efforts on
their best windows of opportunity at all times. Successful cultural
change in the financial services industry will come to those who
are able to exploit their organization's strengths and prioritize
their opportunities. Sustainable change cannot occur without the
discipline and focus of a good sales plan. Getting to the best opportunities
first, best, and always is the goal, and that's the real test of
sales leadership.
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| by Loree Raker Miles
Determining specific objectives for 90 day action plans can be
one of the most difficult jobs sales managers and coaches have.
How do you keep the action items meaningful and focused on skills
that will increase customer satisfaction and retention? At RSM McGladrey,
we |
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Continuous customer evaluations
will also give you new information about the success of various
employee initiatives such as sales training because the customer
feedback is converted to numeric scores in MarketBuilder which you
can use to monitor scores and to set improvement goals. |
| recommend
that you implement a program that monitors both use of preferred selling
skills by employees and customer satisfaction. MarketBuilder is a
program that uses your customers to evaluate the level of service
they received during their last encounter with your institution. This
event could be their last teller transaction, their phone call to
the bookkeeping department, an account opening, or a |
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A word of caution: changing the focus of your training before an
employee has mastered fundamental skills has proven to be counter
productive. We recommend that you focus on several critical selling
skills at a time until they become second nature, and then add a
few new skills at a time until they are mastered.
As your scores rise on the customer evaluations, your high
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| loan inquiry. By completing
customized evaluation forms that ask customers to evaluate and rate
the skills used by employees during the encounter, you can begin to
monitor how well employees are using the skills taught in training.
Ongoing reports help managers and employees focus on specific weak
areas that hurt overall customer satisfaction. If customers are monitoring
the skills you are teaching, you can begin to use the information
in your management and coaching process. For example, in a given month
you might see that scores within a particular branch are low in areas
of "using customer''s name," "asking questions to understand needs,"
and "offering additional related services." It now becomes quite easy
to set constructive improvement goals for 90 day action plans. Your
plans could include role playing and supervisor observations focused
on the use of these skills. |
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performers need recognition. Not recognizing
those who are making the effort to improve sends the message that
following your preferred sales behavior is not terribly important.
Eventually those who are trying to improve either give up or go somewhere
else where they will be recognized for their selling efforts. Through
a consistent process of training and measuring, you will build effective
salespeople with fundamentally sound skills, a reputation in the market
for outstanding service, and a bottom line that reflects both. Our
research demonstrates that better selling does pay off in better earnings.
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