Are you prepared to take customers from the large banks?

As much as you may be opposed to the increased impact of regulation of the financial services industry, take advantage of the one good thing that will come from this – the number of new customers that will be knocking on your door.

Restrictions on overdraft fees chipped away at checking account profitability. Now we have the Durbin Amendment of the Dodd- Frank Act chopping off $5 billion in interchange fee revenue for large banks. The large banks have responded by charging additional fees. Bank of America has led the way with their $5 per month charge to use their debit card. Other large banks are testing different fee structures. Large bank customers will either have to have good-sized account balances or an outstanding loan to keep the free checking accounts they now have. The backlash has been major, and not just from customers. Columnists, pundits, late-night talk show hosts and of all people, President Obama, have put bank fees in the national headlines. This is not just a short-term storm that will pass, but something that will have significant ramifications for a while.

We understand the economic impact of these regulations and defend any institution’s right to charge whatever they see fit for their products and services. But when organizations overreach in pricing, display a disregard for customers and a tone-deafness to the world around them, that creates opportunity for competitors. You, dear readers of this, executives of community banks and credit unions, are their competitors and are beautifully positioned to take advantage of this.

Think of the free advertising and marketing that is now coming your way through today’s headlines. Let’s not waste this golden opportunity.

But are you prepared to take advantage? You may have the best marketing message about who you are (and who you are not) that creates interest in your community, but does your staff have the right skills to turn this additional interest and traffic into new business? Now is the time to determine this and get a game plan in place to deal with it. Ask your executive team and yourself whether your staff can skillfully:

• Engage with these new prospects who come to you looking for help and refuge from an unhappy and expensive large bank experience
• Make these new prospects feel important and “at home” immediately
• Establish trust and credibility from the opening conversation
• Ask open ended questions to find out what is truly important to these new prospects
• Proactively listen to determine the right product or solution
• Position your products in the most advantageous way
• Differentiate your organization from not only the large banks, but from other local competitors
• Sell the advantages and value of having their primary banking relationship with you
• Make the case with a quantifiable, hard dollar, financial impact
• Recommend and sell additional products that fit each prospect’s needs and that deepen your overall relationship

If your staff is not proficient at these skills and behaviors, you will fail to take full advantage of this wonderful opportunity to take market share from the mega-banks and you’ll simply end up with a longer list of single-service, low balance households.

We believe that those institutions that have a sustainable sales process, with a strong commitment of support by management, will be the winners in this important competition. Sales process includes a highly structured new customer on-boarding program that keeps your employees engaged with customers during the first 90 to 120 days of the relationship. Research suggests that approximately 75% of all cross-sales and 50% of customer defections happen in this 90 to 120 period.

Let us know if we can help you build sales skills and sales process in your organization. Having a sales plan can make all of the difference.

Schneider Sales Management most often works with clients in the context of a comprehensive sales and service culture change effort. We’ve written often as to why these initiatives succeed or fail—the sales training effort, the effectiveness of coaching and feedback, the organization’s sales process, and the level of employee focus and accountability. We’ve also had numerous opportunities to observe as our client’s tackle major technology conversions, wholesale product line changes and mergers/acquisitions, and can attribute the success and failure of these efforts as well. The degree of success is often determined not by the core elements of the change initiative, but rather by how equipped the organization’s managers and employees are from a soft skills and project management standpoint.

Soft Skills, also referred to as interpersonal skills or people skills, are behavioral competencies such as communication skills, organization and time management skills, negotiation skills, creative problem solving, strategic thinking, team building, and influencing and selling skills. Soft skills are essentially the skills of relationship management and creativity and are based on emotional intelligence characteristics like self-awareness, social confidence, empathy, self-sacrifice, initiative, originality, adaptability and resilience. We don’t always relate our workplace experiences to the notion of soft skills, but it is not hard to do. If you have ever experienced “death by PowerPoint”, sat through a 2 hour meeting with no agenda and no outcomes, or had a manager who was content to fill their days with administrative or paperwork at the expense of managing the people side of the business then you’ve experienced poor soft skills. Conversely, if you’ve ever left a meeting totally energized and feeling part of the solution or stayed at a job primarily because of your boss then you’ve likely experienced great soft skills in action. Schneider typically sees these skills working during change management initiatives, but they are equally important in the every-day running of an organization.

While there is no definitive list of what constitutes a soft skill, one of the better work-related lists (and definitions) is provided by career coach Lei Han. How are the skills of your managers and employees in each of these areas?

Self Management Skills

• Self awareness – knowing what drives, angers, motivates, embarrasses, frustrates, inspires you.
• Emotion management – being able to control unexpected emotions like anger and frustration so you can think clearly and at your optimum.
• Self-confidence – those who believe in themselves have access to “unlimited power.”
• Stress management – Being able to stay calm and balanced in stressful, overwhelming situations.
• Resilience – Ability to bounce back from a misstep in your job or career.
• Skills to forgive and forget – Ability to move on without baggage from a past mistake or something in your career that wronged you.
• Persistence and Perseverance – Ability to overcome challenging situations and obstacles and maintain the same energy.
• Patience – ability to step back in an emergency to think clearly or the ability to pause and wait when you are in a rush or want to rush others.

People Skills

• Communication skills – general skills to listen and articulate your ideas in writing and verbally to any audience.
• Presentation skills – ability to maintain attention and achieve your desired outcome from presenting to an audience.
• Facilitating skills – ability to coordinate and solicit well represented opinions and feedback from a group with diverse perspectives to reach a common, best solution.
• Interviewing skills – ability to sell your skills as an interviewee or accurately assess another’s ability or extract the needed information as an interviewer.
• Selling skills – this is not just for people in sales.  This is the ability to build buy-in to an idea, a decision, an action, a product, or a service.
• Meeting management skills – this is the skill to efficiently and effectively reach productive results from leading a meeting.
• Influence / persuasion skills – ability to influence perspective or decision making but still have the people you influence think they made up their own mind.
• Team work skills – ability to work effectively with anyone with different skill sets, personalities, work styles or motivation level.
• Management skills – ability to motivate and create a high performing team with people of varied skills, personalities, motivations, and work styles.
• Leadership skills – ability to create and communicate vision and ideas that inspires others to follow with commitment and dedication.
• Skills in dealing with difficult personalities – ability to work well or manage someone whom you find difficult.
• Skills in dealing with difficult situations – ability to stay calm and still be effective when faced with an unexpected difficult situation.
• Ability to think / communicate on your feet (under pressure) – ability to articulate thoughts in an organized manner even when you are not prepared for the question or situation you are in.
• Networking skills – ability to be interesting and interested in business conversations that motivates people to want to be in your network.
• Interpersonal relationship skills – ability to build trust, find common ground, have empathy, and ultimately build good relationships with people you like or in positions of power/influence.
• Negotiation skills – ability to understand the other side and reach a win-win resolution that you find favorable, satisfies both sides, and maintains relationships for future dealings.
• Mentoring / coaching skills – ability to provide constructive wisdom, guidance, and/or feedback that can help others further their career development.
• Organizing skills – ability to organize business gatherings to facilitate learning, networking, or business transactions.
• Self-promotion skills – ability to subtly promote your skills and work results to people of power or influence in your organization.  This will build your reputation and influence.
• Savvy in handling office politics – office politics is a fact of life in corporate America.  This is the ability to understand and deal with office politics so you can protect yourself from unfairness as well as further your career.

The only skill I would add to this list is one that we hear from our clients frequently, and that is Collaboration – working together to achieve a goal by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.

Research published by the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) suggests that there is a 650% return on training dollars spent in preparation of a change initiative, such as a workshop to prepare employees to embrace and handle change or training for managers to more effectively lead the change process. Returns on general leadership training are much higher—in the range of 1,000% to 1,500%. And, something as simple as holding a four hour workshop for managers on conducting effective meetings can yield as much as a 2,000% return. Consider the risks of not equipping your team:

• Major projects will be delayed or stall out altogether if project managers aren’t highly organized, can’t resolve conflicts, and can’t manage people in a matrix environment.
• The benefits of a great kick off meeting or initial training effort will be lost if followed up by uninspiring presentations or boring team meetings with no participation and no measurable outcomes.
• Employee anxiety and frustration will increase dramatically during periods of organizational change due to managers’ poor listening skills, inability to articulate a vision or need to change,
• Employee resistance to change will increase over time if they aren’t equipped to assess the impact of that change, manage their personal feelings, etc.

Even though soft skills are rooted in emotional intelligence, most of them can be learned or improved through training and coaching. Looking at the underlying success factors of major initiatives we’ve observed over 29 years, here is the short list of soft skills training that will get you the greatest payback on your investment. It is no coincidence that the soft skills courses that Schneider offers are focused in these areas:

• Managing organizational change (manager view)
• Embracing organizational change (employee view)
• Behavioral interviewing
• Leadership skills, especially for individuals in you leadership pipeline
• Team building skills
• Organizational skills
• Time management
• Making effective presentations
• Conducting effective meetings
• Communications – organizational and interpersonal

I’ll close by sharing one real-world example of exponential returns on soft skill training that involved a Schneider client in Encino, CA. During our initial new client interviews, employees and managers noted that organizing and completing required new account and loan paperwork was the primary impediment to increasing sales time and seeing more customers (sound familiar?). The bank conducted 5 hour workshops on organization and time management skills for all personal bankers and branch managers which resulted in an increase in total sales sessions (unique customer conversations) of 28% and contributed to the bank’s overall 100% increase in sales productivity. The bank made a one-time investment of $250 per employee in training and increased sales revenue for each personal banker and manager by $140,000 per year, every year. Of course, the bank also provided tools, set expectations, measured performance and held employees accountable for results. Otherwise the training dollars would have been wasted.

If you have managers or employees who are struggling with key soft skills, particularly those on the aforementioned shortlist that greatly affect your ability to complete initiatives, check out our course offering at www.schneidersales.com. If you don’t see exactly what you are looking for then contact us regarding custom soft skills training solutions.

If an untrained interviewer uses an unstructured interview format, then the probability of hiring the best applicant is less than 15%. Source:  Michigan State University, 2002.

Decades of research on hiring practices and job performance has proven that the unstructured job interview used by 95% of all companies has about the same predictive validity or success rate as random selection. In spite of this clear evidence that unstructured interviews have little value in predicting on-the-job performance, organizations have been slow to change their candidate interviewing and selection practices. We should either save time by simply throwing darts at candidate photos to select our new hires or we should improve our processes to increase the correlation of hiring practices to job performance.

Compounding the poor results of unstructured interviews is the widespread use of personality testing to support hiring decisions. In 2007, F. P. Morgeson, J. R. Hollenbeck and N. W. Schmitt of Michigan State University, M. A. Campion of Purdue University, R. L. Dipboye of the University of Central Florida and K. Murphy of Pennsylvania State University, all former editors of research journals where research on personality testing is reported, published their findings based on a review of over 7,000 research studies and articles. They noted that personality tests suffer from several important limitations including the potential for faked answers and that their validity in predicting performance is “still close to zero.”

I can only claim to have read about 150 research articles on the subject of personality testing and assessment testing, but as a former user of personality tests in hiring I have to concur with these findings. After spending over $20,000 to assess 300 employees and job candidates at a large regional bank using three different personality tests from different vendors we were unable to correlate the results to any sales or service performance metrics over an 18 month period. Schneider’s anecdotal evidence from working with hundreds of clients suggests the failure of personality tests to predict performance since companies that use them tend to have as many low or poor performers as they do top performers.

More than 75% of turnover can be traced back to poor interviewing and hiring practices. Source: Harvard Business Review

The Effectiveness of Hiring Practices and Selection Criteria

Based on their research, Spencer and Spencer (1993) reported the following validity correlations with performance for various methods of candidate evaluation. They are ranked in order from most effective to the least effective at predicting on-the-job performance:

• Assessment Centers .65
• Interviews (behavioral) .48-.61
• Work sample tests .54
• Ability tests .53
• Personality tests .39
• References .23
• Interviews (non-behavioral) .05-.19

In another study, Schmidt and Hunter (1998) analyzed hundreds of peer reviewed research articles published over an 85 year period to identify which employee selection methods were best and worst as predictors of on-the-job performance. They evaluated and ranked the effectiveness of 19 different selection factors covering virtually all of the methods employers use when making a hiring decision.  Here is what they found:

• Structured interviews came in number 3.
• Unstructured interviews came in number 9.
• Checking references came in number 13.
• Years of job experience came in number 14.
• Years of education came in number 16.

Number one was general mental ability (GMA) or cognitive ability.

Schneider Sales Management’s (Schneider and Young, 2006) groundbreaking research on 1,000 top performing sales and service personnel in the financial services industry found no correlation of age, gender, ethnicity or education level to sales performance. Even prior experience only mattered slightly and only if it was in the same industry and for the role being recruited, and then only among strong learners.

Even the most optimistic research suggests that personality assessments only add about 5% to 15% to the hiring success rate, yet they are the most widely used form of pre-hire assessment used today.

Why Unstructured Interviews Fail

Unstructured interviews are just that – unplanned, uncontrolled and unformatted. Most hiring managers do little to prepare for candidate interviews and most interviewers are subject to normal human biases, often looking for ‘people like me’. Positive information gleaned about a candidate is weighted more than negative information that we uncover. Even the order in which we interview candidates can cause bias (primacy and recency effects) and factors such as gender, race, age, obesity, appearance, attitude and non-verbal behavior often influence hiring decisions. The halo effect influences interviewer impressions and occurs when one good aspect of a candidate makes them look good in other areas as well. The reverse is also true, where the horns effect causes a negative perception to be generalized to other aspects of the person.

Lastly, the final comparison of candidates is more difficult with unstructured interviews because the same interviewer often asks different questions of each candidate or multiple interviewers ask different questions of the same candidate. In the end, consensus on the best candidate is based primarily on overall impressions or “gut feeling”, or one person simply overrules the others involved in the process to select the candidate they want.

Most hiring managers make their selection decision within the first 3 minutes of the interview. Source: Harvard Business Review

Other Breakdowns in the Selection Process

In our work with clients we have identified several additional factors that contribute to poor hiring decisions, either reflected in employee turnover within the first 90 days of employment or in poor job performance by the selected candidate. Those breakdowns are:

• Less than 5% of companies have provided their managers with training on conducting behavioral interviews or on the use of hiring scorecards.
• There is an over-reliance on one selection tool or method (interviews, personality assessment, skills testing, etc.)
• There is either no structure or a poor structure to the interview process with many companies relying on a single interview or interviewer to make hiring decisions.
• The company has not completed any job benchmarking. This is the process of determining the key accountabilities, skills, behaviors, motivators and task requirements of a specific job.
• There are no positions or hiring scorecards to evaluate candidates against.

Pressure to fill a job position quickly causes organizations to shortcut the evaluation and selection process. The “any warm body now” argument often wins out over holding out for the best possible candidate.

Combing the right assessment tool with a well-structured behavioral and situational interview, a good hiring scorecard, and some simple simulations can increase hiring success rates to over 80%.

Improving the Process and Results

There are some very simple ways for organizations to improve the effectiveness of their candidate interviewing and selection process:

1. Use structured interviews. These are pre-planned, interviewer directed, standardized and pre-formatted. The most common types of structured candidate interviews are situational interviews that use situation-specific questions based on job and look at hypothetical performance. And behavioral interviews that explore past behavior as a likely predictor of future behavior. The more evidence there is of a previous pattern then the more likely it is that it will be repeated in the future.
2. Assessments work, but only if they are comprehensive and lead you to better behavioral and situational interviews. Look for an assessment tool that combines personality traits, emotional intelligence competencies and behavioral competencies. The assessment tool should also provide good behavioral or competency-based interview questions based on the candidates responses to the assessment.
3. Use a comprehensive interview process. Use your human resources professional to pre-screen candidates for key job requirements and experience and to administer assessments. Have the hiring manager explore experience and behavioral competency and the next-higher manager explore team and organizational fit.  Candidates should also be interviewed by a potential peer. Peers often see flaws or strengths that hiring managers don’t see and often understand the requirements of the position better than HR or the hiring manager – they are doing it every day. They also have the most to lose if the manager makes a bad hiring decision since they will have to carry the load for a low performer.
4. Use role plays and simulations to evaluate candidate skills. A quick role play on handling an irate customer, a typical sales situation or conducting a sales meeting or staff meeting can tell you a lot. Have the simulations evaluated by the hiring manager and peer.
5. Use hiring scorecards to improve interviewer objectivity and focus on key job requirements. Hiring scorecards also make comparisons of candidates more objective and improve consensus of candidate rankings among multiple interviews
6. Interviewers should receive training on conducting behavioral and situational interviews.

What’s great about this list is that everything on it can be accomplished in fairly short order. In our work with clients we’ve seen organizations completely overhaul their candidate interviewing and selection processes in as little as 30 to 45 days.

For more information about Schneider Sales Management’s pre-hire assessment tool Optimum Performance Profile, please visit the website www.schneidersales.net.

The virtual classroom courses are great for Bank and Credit Union professionals that work in remote areas, are new to their job role, have expanded job duties that now include selling, experienced sellers looking to re-energize their selling efforts, or any team member that has struggled to meet sales goals. Whether it’s one person or a group of team members, the online virtual training classroom sales training is an efficient and low cost way to improve sales productivity.

The Advantages of Virtual Classroom Sales Training

1. Employees are able to learn from their home or office computer. No travel or travel expenses required.
2. Employees will not lose multiple days of productivity and have to abandon their daily job duties for full day training sessions.
3. Organizations have the ability to train employees using an experienced training vendor without having to sign lengthy contracts. This approach allows organizations to enroll as many or as few employees as desired.
4. Organizations have the ability to free up their training and management team to focus on other projects.
5. Organizations do not have to spend expensive man hours designing internal sales training programs.

The courses that are available in April are:

Retail Selling Training

Audience: Banking and Credit Union Personnel, including but not limited to: Consumer Lenders, FSR’s, CSR’s, MSR’s, and Personal Bankers.

Purpose: The objectives of this conference are to prepare participants to proactively seek sales opportunities, convert inquiries to sales, profile clients for relationship development, build the average revenue per sale through add-on selling, and retain and develop best client relationships. The goal is to help salespeople sell more in less time and to become more proactive in selling to high value clients and prospects.

Date: Classes are delivered in 4 two-hour sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:00-4:00 EST beginning April 12th through April 21st.

Referral Selling Training

Audience: Banking and Credit Union Personnel, including but not limited to: Tellers, CSR’s, MSR’s and other client contact personnel who have referral sales opportunities.

Purpose: The objectives of this conference are to prepare participants to convert referral opportunities into sales and to create referral opportunities.

Date: Classes are delivered in 2 two-hour sessions on Tuesday and Thursday from 2:00-4:00 EST on April 26th and 28th.

You can register for any upcoming training sessions at our online course schedule page.

Visit our course schedule for details.

2. Sales experience is the best predictor of sales success.

3. The best salespeople will be the best sales managers.

4. Sales recruiting is HR’s job alone.

5. Sales competencies are easily coachable.

6. We can use one scorecard to evaluate candidates for all sales positions.

7. The more restrictive we are, the better the applicant pool.

8. We can improve our success rate by recruiting from our competitors.

9. Training and performance compensation will fix our mistakes.

Head over to our Optimum Performance Profile, our online candidate assessment tool, for more information on how to hire the right sales candidate for the role.

Here are five ways your organization can increase sales from tellers:

Job Role Clarity

If you were to ask your teller team why they are not involved in the selling process the answer might be as simple as they didn’t know they were supposed to sell. While management may have the expectation that tellers are to be making referrals, this expectation may not always be clearly communicated to the teller staff. It’s important to take a look at what mixed messages your organization may be sending about the importance of making referrals as part of the daily duties of your teller team.

Begin with the hiring process. When posting a job opening for a teller make sure that the job description emphasizes sales as a key responsibility of the job. Utilize good behavioral questions during the interview to determine a candidate’s desire and capacity to sell. Hire candidates based on proven sales ability and a desire and capacity to sell and don’t let previous transactional experience be the overriding factor when choosing a new teller.

Your new employee onboarding process is another important way to convey the importance of making referrals. When training new hires, is all training focused on compliance, controls, and products or is the proper amount of time dedicated to learning sales skills? When a newly hired teller is shadowing an experienced teller on the job, are they tasked to observe the experienced teller sell or only tasked to observe transactions and learn controls?

When managers are working with experienced tellers, how much time is spent discussing sales and providing feedback in their coaching sessions? When performance evaluations are delivered, what emphasis is put on the teller’s sales performance and growth as a seller? When providing a career path for advancement for tellers, is there a goal they must meet as a seller before they can advance to a role in management or to a role as a platform salesperson?

If many of these questions cannot be answered clearly and consistently, then there is a good chance your organization is not communicating the importance of sales as part of the job duty of a teller.

Goal Setting and Measurement

Goal setting and measurement is a great way to focus your tellers’ selling efforts and track improvements over time. Sales people who set goals consistently outperform those who don’t. Tracking and measuring sales results is an easy way to keep tellers motivated to continue to improve their selling efforts and give them a sense they are making immediate progress.

When your tellers are setting goals, remember the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting acronym. Goals should be SPECIFIC, stating exactly how much of what you want to accomplish. Goals should be stated in terms that are MEASUREABLE, objectives that use quantifiable numbers and percentages are needed for tracking and to determine when goals have been achieved. The goals should be ATTAINABLE and based on realistic numbers from prior experience. The goals should not be so high that sellers get discouraged when goals are not met or too low that achieving the goal requires little to no additional effort. The teller’s goals should be RELEVANT to their role as a seller, as well as the goals of the branch and the organization as a whole. Finally, the teller’s goals should be TIMELY with a specific time of when goals should be achieved.

The goal setting process should be something that is done jointly with their direct supervisor at first and then gradually taken over by the employee over time when they get a strong feel for how the goal setting process works. The goal setting and measurement process is not intended as a way to “beat up” employees that may not be meeting expectations. The process is designed to help your teller staff to buy in to the sales and referral process and hold themselves personally accountable for their success.

Coaching

Tellers need frequent support and feedback to improve their skills as a seller. Managers and teller supervisors cannot coach from sitting behind their desk. Coaching is done by observing teller behavior and providing feedback about their behavior.

While many managers and teller supervisors dedicate time to stand behind the teller line, they often do so with a focus on approving transactions. Since your managers and teller supervisors are already spending time behind the teller line, it should not take any additional time or effort to include observations of referral behaviors. Observations should not be routine and predictable. Observations should be random and spontaneous where feedback is provided immediately to the teller.

When providing feedback, use positive reinforcement as often as possible. Tellers will benefit from hearing “That was a great job providing Mr. Johnson the benefit of reducing his interest payments by consolidating his debt with a home equity line of credit” rather than “I see Mr. Johnson didn’t have a home equity line of credit, why didn’t you set him an appointment with Jane to talk about it?” Also, when providing feedback, focus on the behavior rather than the result. This will encourage the teller to continue to use the preferred behaviors even if it did not result in an immediate sale. A good example would be “That was a great job of overcoming Mr. Johnson’s objection about applying for new credit and personalizing the benefit of our home equity product. Even though Mr. Johnson was not able to meet with Jane today, I’m confident that your ability to connect with your customers/members will lead to many more referral opportunities for you.” When you have to provide critical feedback to correct a behavior, make sure that the teller is provided three positive feedback comments for every critical feedback comment.

Managers and teller supervisors do not have to be the only team members that are providing coaching and feedback to your tellers. The use of peer coaching is a great way to have your team members share their own best practices and leverage the selling strengths of your team members. If a teller is consistently struggling to meet their goals in sales, have them take a step back for a day and shadow one of the branch or region’s best tellers. When selecting teller stations, have your top performer work next to a teller who would like to improve performance. Another best practice is to have a platform salesperson spend time behind the teller line and help coach tellers on how to identify referral cues and have the tellers observe conversations between the platform salesperson and the customer or member. Hearing different approaches and sales techniques from multiple sources will give a teller additional sales tools to keep in their toolbox.

Skill Building

Preferred selling behaviors and referral skills have to be taught and developed with experience. If your tellers are not receiving any training on how to sell and your organization has not developed a defined process on what sales are supposed to look like, it may not be a surprise that it seems that performance is “all over the place.” Top performing sales organizations in the financial services industry have defined a sales roadmap for each job role, as well as a well-defined sales training program that teaches employees how to sell in each job role. Tellers who attend sales training will have a greater understanding of “how to” identify referral cues, sell to the customer’s or member’s viewpoint, and make referrals that lead to appointments and closed sales. It’s not uncommon for tellers who have attended sales training to increase referrals and booked sales by 50-100%.

Many organizations confuse sales training with product training. They assume that if a teller knows what products are offered, they can talk about them effectively. But product training too often focuses on features and not enough on benefits. Many of your tellers can easily describe the features of your products, such as interest rate on savings accounts, APR on a credit card, or that Bill Pay is a free service. However, features alone do not sell products. Benefits also play a role. Most customers or members decide to use a new product based on a combination of emotion and logic. Communicating product benefits like the ability to save time, save money, or provide security helps your tellers cater their sales approach to each individual and include an emotional and logical component to each product. Learning product benefits helps your tellers eliminate the unproductive “product dumping” approach of focusing on only one or two products at a time. Wouldn’t your tellers appreciate never having to say “have you heard about our new low interest rates on balance transfers with our credit cards?” or something similar ever again?

Continuing to practice new skills learned in training and role playing with supervisors will help your tellers sharpen their selling skills. Skill practicing and role playing may be the most hated words in the financial services industry, but the reason they continue to be used as a best practice is because it works. Managers and teller supervisors should dedicate time in their weekly one-on-one coaching sessions to work on preferred selling behaviors through the use of skill practicing and role playing. If possible, have another person there to observe the skill practicing and role playing session to provide additional feedback. When providing feedback, quote exactly the employee said, what behavior the employee was demonstrating, and the impact of what was said. An example would be “When you said to Mrs. Smith that she could use some of the money that she would be saving to help pay for her daughter’s wedding, that was a great example of personalizing the product benefit to Mrs. Smith’s needs. The impact of personalizing the product benefit is that Mrs. Smith is now excited about using her new product to save money.”

Make Selling Fun!

Many tellers are not selling because they are afraid to sell or they think it’s not enjoyable. Selling should not be scary, boring, or a tedious process. Making referrals should be looked at as an extension of great customer or member service. Your team members should believe that they can improve the financial situation of each customer or member that they interact with. Selling is about communicating and connecting with the person in front of you and building long term relationships.

Recognition is a great way to keep your tellers engaged and reinforce the use of preferred selling behaviors. Recognition should be something simple, easy, and fun. A simple verbal recognition either in front of peers or a one-on-one situation is an effective way to make an employee feel good about themselves. Other low cost ideas for ways to recognize and show appreciation for going above and beyond in their selling efforts include passing out candy, treating a team member to coffee or lunch, or the use of pins, stickers or buttons, or a traveling trophy. Recognition should happen frequently enough to where employees feel appreciated for their efforts.

Contests, competitions, and promotions are another great way to make selling at your branches fun. Have your teller teams use their creativity to design a contest or competition that will motivate them to stretch their efforts. Managers and teller supervisors should use sales meetings to rally the team and keep things fun and exciting when discussing the progress of sales.

After all, the tellers are making themselves better, their organization better, and their customer or member’s financial situation better. What isn’t fun about that!

(Original press release can be found here: prweb.com)

Courses will blend the convenience of online delivery with expert-led, interactive learning.

Englewood, CO (PRWEB) February 17, 2011

Schneider Sales Management, a leading provider of sales and service training for financial institutions, announced today that it is launching live, online delivery of its sales training courses. The courses will be delivered online by Schneider’s team of experienced instructors. Learners will be able to enter a virtual classroom to participate, share ideas and discuss best practices with their peers from around the country without having to leave their office or home computer. Three courses for Bank and Credit Union professionals will be available starting Tuesday March 8th: Retail Selling, Referral Selling and Strategic Selling.

Course descriptions, a training events calendar and registration can be found on the Schneider Sales Management website at http://www.schneidersales.com/online-training-schedule.html.

“Too often online training has been limited to having employees reading a computer screen in isolation,” said Thomas Bresnan, President and CEO of Schneider Sales Management. “We believe that sales and service skills are best learned through live, expert-led, interactive sessions. We now have the technology to combine the convenience of online training with the best practices of human support to create an extraordinary learning experience.”

Schneider Sales Management is excited to announce that 3 of our sales training courses for Bank and Credit Union professionals are available through live, interactive, online, virtual classroom delivery starting in March. For the first time, individuals will have access to the world-class Preferred Way of Selling® sales training that has been delivered to hundreds of financial institutions over the past 29 years. The courses are delivered by our experienced Schneider classroom instructors online. Learners can participate, share ideas, and discuss best practices with peers across the country. Participants will be able to improve their sales skills without having to leave their office or home computer.

The virtual classroom courses are great for Bank and Credit Union professionals that work in remote areas, are new to their job role, have been struggling to meet sales expectations, or for experienced sellers looking to re-energize their selling efforts. Whether it’s one person or a group of your team members, the online virtual classroom training is an efficient and low cost way to improve productivity.

To accommodate staffing demands of your branches, courses are offered in 2 hour modules on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Course descriptions, training calendar, and registration can be found at our website. Hurry, registration is first-come first serve and space is limited.

Courses that are available via live online virtual classroom training are:

Retail Selling Training

Audience: Banking and Credit Union Personnel, including but not limited to: Consumer Lenders, FSR’s, CSR’s, MSR’s, and Personal Bankers.

Purpose: The objectives of this conference are to prepare participants to proactively seek sales opportunities, convert inquiries to sales, profile clients for relationship development, build the average revenue per sale through add-on selling, and retain and develop best client relationships. The goal is to help salespeople sell more in less time and to become more proactive in selling to high value clients and prospects.

Referral Selling Training

Audience: Banking and Credit Union Personnel, including but not limited to: Tellers, CSR’s, MSR’s and other client contact personnel who have referral sales opportunities.

Purpose: The objectives of this conference are to prepare participants to convert referral opportunities into sales and to create referral opportunities.

Strategic Selling Training

Audience: Banking and Credit Union personnel, particularly advanced level sales personnel who do proactive prospecting, manage high value relationships, and/or work within a long selling cycle.

Purpose: The objectives of this conference are to prepare participants to gain access to target prospects, to profile clients to identify their best sales opportunities, to develop objectives and specific sales plans for their sales calls and best client relationships, to establish a competitive difference, and to manage movement of prospects through a multi-call sales cycle.

For any questions or comments about our virtual classroom courses or Schneider Sales Management, please feel free to call us at 303-221-4511 or e-mail me at bkinning@schneidersales.com. Please continue to check the website as new courses will be added throughout the year.