Community Banks and Credit Unions today have their greatest opportunity to take market share from large banks, but only if they are prepared to act.
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. (more…)
Selling Skills Aren’t the Only Soft Skills Your People Need
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
Learn how to gain access to target sales prospects, identify the best sales opportunities, improve the success rates of sales calls, and improve client relationships. This class is recommended for all banking and credit union sales personnel who specialize in advanced sales.
Visit our course schedule for details.
1. A born salesperson will be effective in any selling role.
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.
Improving the referral sales performance of a teller team is often the “elephant in the room” when discussing ways to improve revenue and sales performance for financial services companies. It’s easy to see why. Tellers make up the largest number of bank and credit union employees and have the majority of all conversations that your organization has with your customers and members. To many of your customers or members your tellers are the face of your organization. Your tellers have the best relationships with your customers or members, have the best access to information, and have greatest ability to identify sales opportunities. Despite this, most organizations struggle with tellers creating referral opportunities. (more…)
We often say that employees don’t master selling skills in the classroom; they master selling skills on the job. That’s not to say that formal training is not a critical component of the overall selling skill mastery process. Great sales training presents best practices and gives employees ideas on the “what, when and how” of good selling. It provides an opportunity to rehearse new skills and behaviors in a safe environment, to share ideas, and to hear from subject matter experts. Training is only the initial step in a three phase process in developing sales skills and behaviors that also includes coaching and feedback and demonstrating skill mastery on the job. Demonstrating skill mastery and certification of selling skills are the subjects of this brief. (more…)
Did your organization exceed your sales and revenue expectations in 2010? Do you have concerns that your process causes chronic sales underperformance? Are all of your team members engaged in the right activities to make your organization thrive in 2011 and beyond?
Just in time for your 2011 planning sessions, Schneider Sales Management is offering for the first time a special offer on a 3-day onsite Sales Process Assessment and Sales Plan Recommendations for your organization. (more…)
As the 4th quarter kicks off and 2010 starts winding to a close, it’s time to start looking forward to 2011. As budget meetings are beginning for the New Year, it’s time to reconsider the investment in your human capital as a long term growth strategy for your organization. Since the economic downturn, most financial industry organizations have looked to cut budgetary spending across multiple business lines with employee learning and development often being one of the first reductions. (more…)
The financial services industry has gone through a couple years of unimaginable turmoil. We’ve lived through the housing bubble and mortgage meltdown. Once-powerful institutions have been bailed out or merged out of existence. High unemployment rates have impacted foreclosures, credit card and loan losses, savings rates and, still today, hold back our recovery. Sharply rising insurance premiums were necessary to insure underwater institutions do no more damage. And now we face the regulatory aftermath of these issues and the costs and uncertainty that come with financial “reform”. (more…)
