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7. Distorting Sales with Acquisitions
For many large banks, acquisitions hide their weakness in same store sales resulting in less commitment to sales. More important, the promise of "we'll leave you alone" to merger partners virtually always leads to weak sales expectations for acquired companies at the very time the acquiring institution most needs to generate revenue to recover the acquiring bank's investment. The longer the acquired bank operates independent of the acquiring bank's preferred way of selling, the more difficult it is to ever to jumpstart a higher flow of recurring revenue or to establish a unified sales culture.

8. Micromanaging Sales Activity
The largest banks have measures, reports and charts for every sales activity to the point that salespeople have too many conflicting priorities and lose their focus on their most important sales opportunities. A good example of this phenomenon is the overemphasis on call activity

12. Not "selling" the Sales Process
In many large organizations, the most competent sales leaders are often far removed from the sales force which is a barrier to modeling of best practices and to selling the bank's preferred sales process, the sales mission, and what achieving the mission means for frontline employees. They need to be selling their mission and their expectations to sales unit managers forcefully in quarterly sales accountability meetings.

13. Buying Sales with Incentives
The biggest mistake of all made by many large banking groups may be their attempts to buy sales culture by using sales incentives as a substitute for good supervision and good sales process. For sales positions with varied accountabilities, goal achievement has proven to be a stronger, more sustainable performance driver than sales incentives. While sales commissions are a powerful driver of success for many types of selling which provide clear

in bank call programs. Other industries have found that managing call objectives and strategies weekly prior to the calls actually being made has a much more positive impact on production than

sales task, the most successful sales organizations are moving toward performance bonuses and stock options for sales leadership positions, toward a balanced scorecard bonus

reporting every completed activity of selling.

9. Focusing on the Wrong Clients and Prospects
Every bank in the country knows that the top 3-5% of their customers contribute most of their profit. The largest banks just can't seem to reach consensus on who these customers are and what to do with them. Unlike many smaller organizations that have used simple dollars under management and potential for development models developed by firms such as Raddon Financial Group to create high value customer portfolios, the largest banks have typically outsmarted themselves by adhering to current profitability, even in the absence of good profitability data. As a result, a sales unit's best salesperson is often assigned fulltime responsibility for retaining and developing a portfolio that has little potential for development.

10. Selling in "Silos"
The more dedicated sales units a bank has, the less likely it is that a customer's relationships will be managed in its entirety by one sales unit, or that unified sales goals will be established for the relationship. Nonbank competitors are much better at setting relationships goals and team selling their high value relationships.

11. Rolling Out "One Shot" Sales Initiatives
Unlike the best sales organizations in other industries which tend to invest in substantial sales training processes that produce real mastery of selling, the largest banks tend to roll out their sales initiatives to thousands of employees at one time in one shot programs with little or no follow-up. Our small and midsize clients tend to develop extended sales skill mastery certification and field coaching programs to extend and certify mastery of fundamental selling skills.

approach to incentives for most sales positions to reward profit contribution and client portfolio development, and toward more use of recognition programs to extend their budgets. Incentive compensation works in moving behavior, but at too high a cost if it's merely a substitute for good supervision.

Selling Smarter Will Improve Shareholder Value
With their unrelenting emphasis on ownership and accountability that drives their continuing sales focus and their active recruiting of salespeople who can sell, nonbanks are simply outperforming the large banking groups one on one in the trenches. Community banks and credit unions are outselling many of their large bank competitors and sustaining customer loyalty with true portfolio management of their best customers and with proactive, "hands on" coaching and direction of their employees by their senior managers. The impact of poor selling at large banks on shareholder value goes well beyond simple losses in market share and share of wallet. Selling to the wrong prospects and clients and the inability to justify higher pricing with differentiated value through personal selling results in lower profit margins. There's also a huge daily opportunity cost in lost revenue associated with failing to leverage existing sales contacts. Conversely, since shareholders and stock analysts monitor and value a bank's sales effectiveness, selling smarter ultimately translates into higher shareholder value. The largest banks have huge competitive advantages over their nonbank and small bank competitors in terms of resources, customer base, and product mix. Yet, with regard to sales, these banks will always be underperforming with regard to their potential shareholder value unless they get serious about FOCUS and ACCOUNTABILITY for sales. Sales has to be a managed process.