This SlideShare explores how retail banking professionals can convert the customer’s needs into a sale and provides tips for how to enhance your retail banking service through building a better mindset, engaging with the customer, and develop enhanced value.
2. Traditional retail banks are
struggling to attract and retain
customers. As a result, retail
banks are rethinking their
strategies. Retail banks are
turning to their service
professionals. Effective retail
banking professionals use their
detail to discover unexpected
value for customers.
14. About Richardson
Richardson is a global sales training and
performance improvement company
focused on helping you drive revenue and
grow long-term customer relationships.
Our market proven sales and coaching
methodology combined with our active
learning approach ensures your sales
teams learn, master, and apply new
behaviors when and where they matter
most - in front of the buyer. Get to know us
and learn about how we help drive the
world’s most inspiring sales organizations
to their next level of excellence.
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Strategic Account Planning in your organization should be a simple, yet powerful and repeatable process that facilitates three critical things:
– First, it helps you identify the appropriate information you need to make the best decisions to develop strategies that allow you to maximize the relationship. It enables you to organize what you know and understand and highlight what you don’t know so you can gain critical information and make the best decisions on actions to take.
– Second, it gives you a format for capturing and leveraging that information for your strategic customers. It provides an organized way to capture the critical information necessary to make good decisions in order to have the greatest impact on achieving your revenue objectives. If you don’t have a place to capture the information and then easily use it to make decisions, it’s not much different than not having the information at all. People who are disorganized often miss some simple and obvious steps that have a dramatic impact on their relationships and the achievement of their goals.
– Third, it gives you a way to analyze that information for the purposes of creating goals, objectives, strategies, and a tactical action plan that, when executed, helps you achieve your overall goal in a specified time frame.
LINA: clean up to look good.
Early Stages:
Build relationships with all stakeholders
Understand business and individual needs
Gauge interest, comfort level, agreement, and alignment
Assess the power structure
Share insight about the issue and stakeholder needs and perspectives to clarify thinking and align perspectives
Float ideas to gauge reaction and foster buy-in
Uncover perceptions of risk and share perspective on how to mitigate risk
Middle:
Synthesize the different perspectives and needs into one cohesive case-for-change storyline
Share insight about the issue, stakeholder needs, and solution options to clarify thinking and align perspectives
Reinforce common ground
Uncover and understand points of stakeholder misalignment
Share perspective and ideas to meet all needs
Develop, adjust, and refine the solution based on evolving requirements
Address concerns over risk
Later:
Reinforce common ground
Address areas of misalignment
Resolve late-stage concerns and reinforce personal value
Highlight the risk of no change and delay in decision to drive momentum
Set Expectations:
SET EXPECTATIONS
Communication is critical. Sales professionals need to know that sustainment is a priority for the leadership. These expectations should be expressed in clear, actionable language containing no ambiguity. Additionally, leaders should underscore the urgency of the expectations by expressing them in the right medium. That is, they should conduct a meeting in which all expectations are outlined in person. If the selling organization is distributed geographically and an in-person meeting is not possible, then leaders should share expectations via video. The key is to avoid easily dismissed messaging like emails or a short memo. Just as sales professionals are expected to sustain skills, leaders should be expected to sustain communication by reinforcing expectations consistently. One announcement is not enough. Achieving this critical first step immediately places leaders ahead of the competition, given that “only about half of employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them at work,” according to research from Gallup.
CONNECT SKILLS TO CHALLENGES
Skill training often unfolds in the controlled environment of a classroom. Scenarios are clearly defined, and outcomes are hypothetical. Converting learned selling skills to the real world is more challenging. Leaders need to help sales professionals bridge the gap between the classroom and the real world by encouraging skill adoption immediately after training when it’s still fresh. When sales professionals see the effectiveness of the skills in real selling situations, they’re more likely to continue using them. In other words, skill effectiveness gives sales professionals agency, and agency underpins sustainment. To connect skills to real selling challenges, leaders should also encourage sales professionals to “post-game” each sale, whether successful or not, and reflect on lessons learned. Consider Harvard research findings showing that “reflection has an effect on both self-efficacy and task understanding.”
PREVENT RELAPSE
Change takes time, and most of us are impatient. If people don’t feel like they are making progress with the new behaviors, they are much more likely to return to their pre-training behaviors. It is important to break up behavior change into incremental steps so that people feel that they are making progress. In addition, success, even partial success, is important so that people feel the benefits of putting in the effort to master the new knowledge and skills. Many sales professionals have habits that are counter to the new skills. Leaders can help them overcome this problem by using the old habits as a trigger for the new ones. As Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit explains, “the Golden Rule of Habit Change: you can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.”
CREATE ACCOUNTABILITY
Hold people accountable for their behavior change. Doing so helps people to take personal ownership of change management. Without accountability, sustainment can feel like a “top-down” approach in which sales professionals take directives from leaders. This approach puts distance between the sales professional and the outcomes of their work. Sustainment requires sales professionals to see the connection between their efforts and results. Create this setting by communicating that each person is responsible for sustained skill adoption. At the same time, remind employees that the leaders represent a support structure and resource. Accountability is a routine; it must be perpetual and underpinned by direct feedback. Employees need to know where they stand. Honest communication is important because it ensures that the employee’s understanding of expectations matches those of the leadership. Finally, accountability requires measurement. Both leaders and employees appreciate the clarity that comes from well-defined metrics.
SHAPE THE CULTURE AROUND SUSTAINMENT
Behavior changes must be “real” and not a “flavor of the month.” If people go through training but their work environment has not noticeably changed to support the new behaviors, people will think that the new behaviors are optional or, worse, that management is not serious about change. On the other hand, if people go through training and return to a work environment that is significantly different and better aligned to support the new behaviors, people will see that management is serious about this change.