“To begin is the most important part of any quest and by far the most courageous.”

Plato

Yearend This and That

Last month’s newsletter concerning the Fa La La Folly generated more e-mails on each side of the holiday card issue than any previous edition. It appears many “traditionalists” believe that ceasing sending holiday cards would send a negative message. It is also apparent that the Thanksgiving Card phenomenon has gained momentum – especially e-cards.

The goal of this publication is to make readers think – not always agree. We love it when readers question our logic. We enjoy writing back to explain all sides of an issue. Sales is an art. It is a blank canvas waiting to be painted - usually outside the lines.

So, send whatever card(s) you wish. If you want to have some fun, though, go to www.americangreetings.com and try sending a talking card. Humor is a great sales tool and as long as the recipient has a sense of humor, it will be a big hit.

Also, this month’s newsletter provides a note of caution. The holiday season is a great time to celebrate with associates in your departments. More food adorns break rooms of banking offices than could ever be consumed during this time of year. Merriment abounds at well-deserved holiday extravaganzas. Without adding a scrooge-like element to the festivities, remember the following:

The Disciplines of Hiring Exceptional Talent

By Steve Cundall
President, Cornerstone Group

“How can I possibly make my 2006 numbers with these salespeople?”

This burning question has haunted sales leaders forever. It keeps us up at night, and has at times overwhelmed us. What is particularly daunting is that sinking feeling that we have the wrong salespeople on the bus and no amount of training and support is going to dramatically improve them. Try as we might with coaching, incentive programs and even threats of termination, the results never improve.

So who’s to blame for having salespeople who aren’t equipped to sell? Most often we are! The harsh reality is we simply hired the wrong people. Every associate we hire either strengthens or weakens our sales team. There is no neutral hire! So why then do so many sales leaders end up with people who don’t deliver on their promises during the interview process? In some cases we are confident the person will ultimately be a star, at other times we aren’t completely sold ourselves but the pressure we are feeling to get “someone hired” leads us to the rationalization that “I can make this person successful”. In either case there are disciplines and filters that, if followed, will always result in making better hires.

The following are the core disciplines of selecting great sales talent. These critical filters look beyond the obvious factors of education, experience, and skills and drill down into the primary factors that most influence sales success or failure. By properly applying these filters you will be in a much better position to assess a sales candidate. Your result will be consistently better hires.

Stability is the first filter that we apply when initially assessing a candidate. It sounds pretty basic but I’m often amazed at how many companies hire salespeople who have had six jobs in four years. The best predictor of future stability is past stability. People can always give you the logical reasons for having left past employers. They’ll tell you things like “I left for more opportunity”, “I was recruited out of that company”, “New management came in and I was the odd one out” etc, etc. Don’t buy it! No one will tell you “well…I hated prospecting” or “I couldn’t close business to save my life”. The fact is that whatever the reasons (that they gave you), they have a consistent history of leaving companies after short stays and the likelihood is that they’ll exit you too.

When looking at someone’s resume, ask yourself this question. Which of this person’s former employers received a great return on their investment? A good rule of thumb is to look for salespeople who have averaged three or more years in previous sales positions.

You can and should make exceptions for more entry-level sales positions, using the following filters more rigorously in those cases.

In the selection process it’s easy to over-value experience and under-value sales achievement. Its one thing to sell for 15 years and yet another to have been a consistently top performer during that time. Always look for people who have ranked in the top third of their prior sales organizations. Ask for validation of that achievement and if they can’t produce it then don’t buy it! Ask interview questions such as “How many salespeople were there in your last sales organization?” “What was your sales ranking within that group?” “Can you provide documentation of that?”

It is critical that a candidate’s values are consistent with those of your organization. When assessing candidates I place them into two general categories; winners and victims. I never hire victims, ever! Here is how I would define the two groups.

Winners take responsibility for all of their success and failures. They are committed to personal and professional development and in some respects, work as hard on themselves as they do on their job. Winners have a great sense of their strengths and weaknesses and embrace constructive feedback that will increase self-awareness, providing a roadmap for future development.

Victims have a low tolerance for organizational flaws, make excuses for their lack of success, and are reticent to give others credit for their successes, generally attributing it to lucky breaks. Victims deflect constructive feedback as a defense mechanism, freeing them of any responsibility for personal development.

The best way to identify and assess these qualities is through effective interview questions that allow candidates to provide open responses to the following questions;

Listen for the tone of the responses. How much credit do they give others? How aware and honest are they regarding their strengths and weaknesses? Will they inspire others?

Build a team of winners and you will love coming to work everyday. Your team will inspire you, rewarding you for your efforts with loyalty, enthusiasm, and great sales production!

The last filter that we apply is natural sales aptitude. By using assessment tools such as Predictive Index, you are able to accurately predict how a person will align with your specific sales model and culture. This tool helps to define the behavioral demands of sales jobs within specific organizations. Whether your model is transactional, relationship, solutions or some blend thereof, this tool will tell you how well aligned a person is given the demands of that job.

This tool helps you to identify and validate critical sales aptitudes in all areas of the sales process including developing new prospects, qualifying sales opportunities, listening and being consultative, handling objections, being professionally persistent, meeting change and challenge, flexibility, decision making etc. Using these types of tools will help you to make better decisions and will significantly lower your risk of hiring a salesperson that will keep you awake at night.

Testing is becoming more popular in banking as well. Both large and community banks are finding tools such as Predictive Index effective and affordable. It costs you dearly when the wrong person jumps on the bus. PI and other tools like it can increase your percentage of getting the right people hundreds fold.

Imagine knowing that a person won’t prospect before your hire them instead of afterwards! A combination of testing and better interview questions will uncover that issue.

These are rigorous filters and take great skill, self-discipline, and intestinal fortitude to implement; however the paybacks are huge, resulting in lower turnover, a more stable and motivated sales force, and consistently higher sales.

Apply these filters every time and I guarantee that you won’t lie awake at night thinking “how do I make my numbers with these people?”

SM&H Commentary

We asked Steve Cundall to write for this newsletter in December for a clear reason. This is the time of year when you begin to evaluate your talent for 2006. This is also the time when bankers are getting their bonuses locked in and updating their resumes. We are hearing more and more how tough it is to find quality bankers to fill positions and how salaries and signing bonuses are getting more and more competitive. Paying someone a goodly sum is fine as long as they can exceed expectations. One fallacy is that a commercial banker will bring a good portion of their portfolio over to the new bank. That may or may not be true and it is less likely if the banker has had three or four positions in the area for the past X number of years. Customers get tired at some point of changing banks when the banker does.

Steve Cundall can be reached at 508-829-1665 or by e-mail at steve.cornerstone@verizon.net. Steve’s firm has worked with a number of SM&H clients very successfully. If you decide to take the plunge into sales acumen testing, we highly recommend Steve and his firm.

Activity Management – Analyzing the Impact of the RM’s Portfolio Composition on Calling Focus

By: Prince Varma
Practice Manager, Baker Hill Corporation

Oh NO!!!! Not another article about counting and tracking sales calls… ok yes it is… The basis of Activity Management in banking has continued to evolve since its introduction over twenty years ago. Initially, “sales process consultants” introduced a “proactive business development” approach which was focused on transitioning lenders away from waiting for the “business to come in the door” to actively develop opportunities by calling on potential clients. To our enormous surprise, this concept was not readily embraced, Lenders did not start scheduling appointments and knocking on doors, in fact “credit and financial spread analysis” seemed to gain a phenomenal, almost religious resurgence and there didn’t seem to be enough time in the day to handle servicing both the existing clients as well as meeting with the ones who called in.

Undaunted, the fearless sales process consultant weighed in with another “suggestion.” Have the lender count the number of calls that they are making daily and provide us with a “Tick Sheet”. This would clearly enable lenders who were too busy to make calls the opportunity to show us the extent of their workload, and those that weren’t would be mollified and shamed into making calls….“Brilliant Holmes…”

Alright, so that didn’t exactly workout the way we had expected either. Lenders were making “600 calls a day”. WE WERE BUSY, WE NEEDED ASSISTANTS. We were fudging the call reports. Thus was born the “information age” where sales force automation would “automatically” capture all the calls being made: by type, by client or prospect, by time of day, etc. lenders would be free to focus on being lenders and not worry about ticking off calls. This led to the introduction of the “call count/big brother” sales management mindset that plagues many of us today and ultimately is at the heart of the resistance to process improvement technology today.

What went wrong? Is it the technology? Is it the desire to capture information? Or is it the way in which we executed?

All financial entities, and with very few exceptions, all lenders today use some form of technology, whether it is the core system to get account information, the loan origination/processing system to submit or analyze an application, a MicrosoftTM application (MS Word, Excel) or an e-mail application. So technology seems not to be the culprit. The answer really rests in the evolution of the last two questions posed; information captured and execution, and is at the crux of this article.

When examining and tracking “calling behavior” or activities using technology, many of us fell into a trap as we attempted to configure a “simple, intuitive and foolproof” tool – quite simply, we tried too hard. Over the past 15 years, I have had the pleasure of working with institutions both across the country as well as foreign banks and have recommended the values that typically are found in an “activities menu/table”. These tables are typically designed to serve two key purposes:

In the past these activity tables contained 15 – 20 different values, all carefully determined to enable an RM to easily select the task/activity that mirrored their workflow throughout the client interaction and made it virtually impossible to not indicate with clarity what the RM was up to (or not up to), and so readily enable a sales leader to determine and address potential issues. Sounds logical. Seems to make sense. What is the point?

In reviewing the sales process methodology (its what we consultants do on vacation) that I had recently helped to develop, I was struck by the following thought: All Activities that RMs complete readily fall into three “activity categories:

Secondly, the composition or make up of the RM’s portfolio plays a critical role in defining the type of activity that they are and should be engaging in. Examples of “portfolio types” include:

The graphic below allows us to quickly engage in an Activity Analysis. The composition of the RM’s portfolio will play the determining role in how they should split their time, and as a manager, I can readily assess if an RM is effectively using his/her time by looking at the following chart:

Looking at this graphic, let’s examine Bill Jackson’s activity matrix, (assume that Bill is responsible for a “developing portfolio”), here are some observations we could make:

Had we examined the RM’s performance using a traditional activity tracking approach we would likely have thought the following about Bill:

Ok, I exercised some license in creating these comparisons, but you get the point. The question now is whether migrating to this approach makes sense for your bank. If so, start by introducing the following steps:

SM&H Commentary

Prince Varma is the Practice Manager for Client Acquisition and Relationship Management Strategies at Baker Hill Corporation. Prince has had almost 20 years experience implementing performance and sales management processes with some of the nation’s most recognized organizations. He has spent the last twelve years specifically working with financial services institutions in implementation of sales information management technology solutions. Baker Hill, an Experian Company, designs, develops and delivers business process solutions that help financial institutions profit from client relationships that span across all lines of business. Founded in 1983, the company is the trusted advisor to over 1,200 financial services institutions.

Prince Varma, can be reached at 1-800-821-8664 ext. 6246 or e-mail pvarma@bakerhill.com.