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…)
Schneider Sales Management’s live, interactive, online, virtual classroom sales training courses are now accepting enrollment for our upcoming training courses in April. These sales courses, which have been administered to thousands of Financial Services Sales Professionals for the past 29 years, are delivered online by our experienced Schneider training instructors. Learners can participate, complete activities, share ideas, and interact to learn best practices in Financial Industry sales and service with peers across the industry. (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.
The Optimum Performance Profile site has been updated in response to client feedback. Administrators and candidates will find the interface more user-friendly and accurate. Visit www.SchneiderSales.net and see how you can hire better sales people.
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…)
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…)
It’s a new year, a new decade and for many financial institutions it’s time to assess and address the status of their sales and service organization. While our focus is on consulting, training, coaching and metrics in the field of sales, service and sales management, the following article may be applied to almost any area of your organization. (more…)
