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…)
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…)
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…)
We would like to thank you for the continued support and positive feedback we have received for The Schneider Report since its inception in March of 2009. Since our first issue, we have grown our subscription from a little over 1,000 to currently reaching more than 16,000 financial service professionals and industry leaders. We sincerely appreciate your interest in our articles and value your readership. Please visit our visit our website www.schneidersales.com if you would like to view past Schneider Reports articles. (more…)
We have had an extremely positive response to our March 31st Schneider Report article, “Coaching to Increase Sales,” written by Steve Wallace. What seems to emerge in the feedback we have received is that so many institutions see coaching as both a low cost and rapid way to positively impact sales. Everyone realizes that a complete sales culture transformation takes time to implement and perhaps a few months to begin to see the payback in actual performance improvements. (more…)
People do what they do because of what happens to them when they do it. This applies to your sales force, as it does to anyone, anywhere within your organization. The challenge becomes reinforcing the positive results you want to see and minimizing those activities that are not contributing to your bottom line. A defined, consistent coaching routine is the best way to get the most from your people, and deliver the best results for your firm. (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…)
I wanted to pass a long an article written by Jim Schneider, our Founder and Vice Chairman. This article is the cover story in the current July/August issue of ABA Bank Marketing and features 10 pragmatic ways to sell your way out of the current financial crisis.
The Squeeze: Selling in Tough Times
During the last year, the market dynamics have changed, and banks need to modify their sales and marketing strategies accordingly. In this new environment of uncertainty and of mistrust of even the highest-performing companies, branding, advertising, pricing and other passive marketing strategies aren’t likely to yield the same high returns on investment that they’ve yielded in the past. (more…)
