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Help Me Understand: An Editorial Rant

By Jack Hubbard, Chief Experience Officer

Bob St. Meyer has a goodly number of phrases that we and our clients have come to enjoy. One of his favorites is “help me understand.” With Bob’s permission I’m using that to discuss two issues for readers to consider this month.

Help me understand why people feel compelled to activate their Outlook Out of Office messages and why voice mails indicate they are out, away or unavailable. This came to light again recently after I returned from a speech and sent follow-up e-mails to attendees. More than 50% of the time I received some I’m away message. More interesting, I also got an opened receipt or correspondence back from almost every banker in less than six hours indicating in some manner they opened the e-mail.

Voice mail is another deal. A good majority of conference attendees and banking school students likely put some away message on their office lines to let clients and pre-clients know they are gone for the day or week. Bankers in meetings or on calls for the day do it too. What’s the point? At session breaks everyone rushes for the exits to check voice mail. Driving from call to call or meeting to meeting allows similar opportunities to review messages and return the highest priority phone calls.

OK, if someone is out on vacation, medical leave or on an extended sabbatical, I can appreciate receiving the notification so I know to reach out to someone else. But why do salespeople make it evident they are not around? Is it better as a client to know that you might call me back or feel it is likely you won’t call me back? And, if it’s important, I don’t want to talk to the someone else who is likely buried with their own clients. I don’t know how to use my away thingy on Outlook and I wouldn’t use it if I did. SM&H associates don’t create negative curiosity on their voice mail either by indicating they are gone.

We’re in a world where good service has clearly migrated to the customer experience. I vote for that. I’m also well aware that everything said, done, written reflects on your bank and you personally as the sales associate. So next time you are thinking about telling a client or potential client that you are not available to them, think of how that lands in their life and reflect on the action they might take when they feel you aren’t there to help. Please don’t violate bank policy. If the bank requires you to put your away message on—they pay you, I don’t. Your customer ultimately signs your paycheck and isn’t this about them?

Help me understand why there is one bank in this country that doesn’t employ some type of Sales Force Automation to track sales call activities strategically and help me understand why every Business Banking Sales Manager does not provide weekly feedback on call reports. With the many cost effective tools out there like salesforce.com, ACT, Goldmine and Sales Logix, it is amazing that business banking divisions in every asset classification continue to fail their people so miserably. Worse, they are failing their customers. In this world of information overload, there is no way for a Relationship Manager to keep every client need on paper. There is no way for them to proact to every customer need without technology support. I’ve heard all the excuses:

I can’t make this stuff up. I even had one EVP at a good sized bank say to me recently, “You know, we should get to that, but my IT folks feel it is a low priority.” WHAT??? This “operations runs the bank” is the kind of thinking that is making our industry a dinosaur. We are great at evaluating and still not good at executing. We are huge at talking about how we Onboard new customers but we don’t have the inclination or resources to track the process. We’ve spent literally billions on sales and sales management training but the return has been fairly minimal.

If you owned a business and your livelihood depended on the strategic approach sales associates and sales managers took toward the changing customer buying process, would you have some type of SFA program to track progress? Would operations stand in your way? At our little company we’ve had a way to track sales activities since we opened our doors. It’s one of the first things we did. The sales manager (me) talks to his people about sales strategies they are taking with their clients and pre-clients every day—every day. If your bankers called on a business of any size and the business gave the same excuses as above as to why they don’t track their sales, how likely is it that you would want to do business with them?

Help me understand why any banker that has great tracking resources at their disposal would opt not to embrace their amazing SFA gift whether they are coached around the process or not. It’s bad enough when technology is not available. It’s worse to let the system go unused.

Do you have opinions on any of these subjects or best practices you can share in next month’s edition? Of course you do and we would love to hear it. Send me an e-mail at jhubbard@stmeyerandhubbard.com and we’ll use your comments. We won’t use your name if you don’t want us to.

Achieve Sales Excellence—A 2007 Must-Read

The HR Chally Group was formed in 1973 under a Department of Justice grant to create a predictive assessment system to prepare for upcoming EEOC legislation. More than 2,500 organizations in 35 countries have employed Chally’s services in talent management, leadership development and sales improvement. Over the past 14 years, Chally has conducted interviews with 80,000 buyers and 200,000 sales associates in an effort to determine specific competencies common to a world-class sales professional. The results are contained in Achieve Sales Excellence, authored by Chally’s Chairman and CEO, Howard Stevens.

There are 221 reasons to buy, read and use the information in this book (that’s the number of pages of narrative and there is something to gain from every page). First, the book is based on scientific information, not anecdotes. In part one, readers learn the seven rules of Sales Excellence. They are written from the customer’s point of view and every rule has specifics that top salespeople do to exceed customer expectations. Part two asks eight questions that form the components of a world-class sales organization. These range from what drives the company’s culture to how the culture trains and develops its customer facing associates.

If you are a sales manager in any area of banking, reading this book will increase your understanding of how to coach your people to conversation excellence. If you are a salesperson and you want to learn how to be best-in-breed, the information will tell you exactly where to begin. If you are an executive manager, Achieve Sales Excellence will help create a strategic roadmap for success.

2007 Retail White Paper Results, Part One

By Julie Ruffolo, Executive Vice President

In late 2006, St. Meyer & Hubbard conducted in-depth interviews with 48 of America’s top sales banks to learn what retail strategies were in place to drive profitability and the customer experience and what plans these organizations had for 2007 and beyond to take their banks to the next level of retail excellence. We wanted to know:

The 48 banks that participated in this survey have received the full report. Banks were placed into four tiers depending on asset size.

We made that promise to the bankers that invested a substantial amount of time with us on the telephone. Over the next several months, however, we’ll share some highlights from the study. This time we’ll focus on the many areas of the bank that may interact with customers and how these are coordinated for the most successful customer experiences.

Customer Experience and Numerous Channels of Delivery

The banks included in the study reported a wide variety of structures within their retail business lines. Some institutions include their Contact Centers within the retail groups; others are configured so that Contact Centers and Online Banking report to other areas. In all cases, bank customers interface with a number of channels for delivery of service, sales and general information.

In our survey, we asked: If a customer uses one area for service, such as the Main St. Branch and then visits another area, say a different office, or even phones the call center, what information is shared between and among bankers and how is that accomplished? How are you able to execute an integrated customer experience across all channels?

The example used in the interviews was that a customer contacts the Call Center about an issue or a problem. Several days later, the customer walks into a branch and subsequently another different branch on another day. How is a seamless experience created so that all associates are apprised of what transpired and can act appropriately?

Of those we spoke with, 77% of the banks have no strategy in place to create an integrated experience across all channels. Just 6% of respondents suggested that a customer integration initiative was on the drawing board for 2007.

One challenge banks face is the inflexibility of host systems and the inconsistency of overall technologies to bridge the internal information gap. Some banks utilize a front-end system that allows service notes or issues in progress to be displayed and tracked. Some have utilized notes fields or unused data fields on the host to capture information. Consistency around what information is captured during a customer interaction is another issue that most banks have failed to address.

Growth Strategies from Micro- to Small Business

Most banks revealed a focus on organic growth in 2007. How wallet share is deepened in the small and micro-business space is a critical component of that effort. Likely opportunities for getting deep and wide include: developing efforts to garner the business owner’s personal accounts, introducing trust and wealth management into the mix and using the mortgage division as a means of “getting stickier.”

One of the building blocks of this “deep and wide” internal strategy is a cohesive referral system that measures the process of recommending one area of the bank to another. Respondents report that simply tracking the number of referrals made and providing feedback on that activity impacts the referral stream and improves quality and close rates.

If interaction between referring parties is frequent, strategic and consistent within all lines of business, the ability to retain, grow and solidify new businesses is even more significantly affected. The study explored how banks are organizing this level of communication around business development efforts.

Our interviews encouraged banks to discuss their referral systems. We wanted to know:

a. How is information shared?
b. How are leads shared?
c. Are there planned strategies for developing leads across these lines?
d. What type of team selling is accomplished around top clients and how is retail involved?
e. How do team goals and/or team compensation structures affect this?

We found that referral systems are in place in the majority of surveyed banks. For several of the banks, this was limited to one area, such as between Retail and Wealth Management.

Nearly 50% of the banks have an integrated referral strategy with other departments. Several of these banks have branded the initiative with a specific name (such as Key Account Teams or KATs) that is reflected in the title team roundtable meetings that regularly occur with their counterparts as well as in reports that act as scorecards for the various groups. Respondents also included shared goals and cross-compensation among departments. Joint calls were frequent action items out of the roundtables and most banks reported that they have tracked progress on a week-over-week basis. Most senior executives cited that maintaining credit for business that shifts from one area to another is important to eliminating the downside of sharing a customer with another group.

There is significant opportunity here to optimize growth at a very low acquisition cost by mining partner customer bases. Trust-building, consistent communication and transparency are the keys to tearing down silos. We heard many horror stories about business being pirated from one area, resulting in a “we win, you lose” mentality. These experiences damage current and future efforts and create a level of cynicism that may never be overcome. The key is a “world of abundance” mindset throughout the bank and high levels of trust established and exemplified at the highest levels of the bank.

Senior management can speed silo destruction by providing fair compensation to all parties when referrals are made and received. Existing compensation structures often hinder cross-referrals because the balance sheet drives banker activity rather than an intelligent strategy that is right for the customer. A big complaint we often heard concerned the quality of referrals. Helping a teller understand that every customer that cashes a check is not a candidate for remote capture is a start. Helping them understand how to listen for cues and clues, teaching them to observe patterns of behavior (such as a consultant coming to the bank twice a week with large checks) and providing high-impact questions about the possible need for a better way to bank can all contribute to the number and quality of referrals made through the teller line.

Creating communication links between departments has been effective at reducing the silo mindset. In addition to regular strategy and networking meetings, the sales manager’s ability to pull reports across various business lines and to analyze them effectively is critical to identifying the most important opportunities.

In the April Conversation Signposts we’ll discuss how retail divisions are proacting to the micro-business marketplace. This will dovetail into the results of the unscientific survey about micro-business strategies— we’ve been accumulating data for the past two months from newsletter readers.

“Branching Out”

A Wall Street Journal Article from March 19, 2007

Every one of us reads to some level to help us increase our industry knowledge. Sometimes reading what people are saying about us is equally valuable. On a flight back from Palm Springs, my wife pointed out such a narrative in the March 19, 2007 Wall Street Journal. The article, “Branching Out” by David Enrich, discussed how banks are attempting to pay more attention to entrepreneurs and how entrepreneurs need to pay more attention to banks. From issues around access to capital, the cookie cutter approach, more than loans and what a business owner should think about when selecting a bank, this article is one you won’t want to miss. Heck, it’s my bank! Help me understand why every business banker isn’t reading it and why I wouldn’t talk about it during a sales meeting in the very near future. If you need a copy of this article, send me an e-mail and I’ll forward you one.

Register for Conversation Signposts

2007 is in full swing. Bankers tell us the articles and ideas in Conversation Signposts make a difference in their sales mojo. If someone else at your bank could benefit from Conversation Signposts, forward this edition to them and have them click on the hyperlink below to register: it’s FREE.

http://www.stmeyerandhubbard.com/signup.html

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