Win One for the Coach

Paul Robert
July 6, 2010 | COMMENTS

Creating a strong, sustainable sales culture has long been a key objective for most financial institutions. This need is highlighted in the current economic environment, where institutions are focused on acquiring and retaining deposits, expanding customer relationships, and strengthening trust and loyalty with customers. In fact, deposit growth and customer acquisition/retention were ranked as the top two “pain points” by community bank executives in a recent BAI survey.

Obviously, without sales, there can be no growth. Creating and sustaining that sales culture, however, has proven problematic. A key reason is often the lack of effective sales coaching, which is the linchpin of any comprehensive approach to building a sales culture because it provides the most direct feedback loop between front-line branch employees and their managers.

The goal is incremental coaching that cumulatively brings about a powerful wave of behavioral change in the organization. Both coaching and leadership play important roles here. An organization may have an outstanding leader, but if that leader departs the scene, the sales culture can decline. It's up to the coaches to keep the focus on sales and service in the trenches.

Coaching is the key to creating a sales culture because it encourages branch managers to think differently about their pivotal role in the organization and then use this new approach to get the most from their staff. Effective coaches help shape the behaviors, skills and attitudes of the people they manage. Coaching is the single most important action that branch managers can take to prompt their employees to meet or exceed their business goals.

What does it take to transform managers and supervisors into effective coaches at the branch level? Process, skills, and attitude. Rather than telling front-line staff what to do, branch managers need to adopt a powerful questioning strategy to assist tellers and personal bankers in thinking independently. It can be as simple as sitting down individually with each person on a team and asking, “What do you need to do differently or better in the next 90 days to help our team reach its goal?”

Agreed-upon strategies are recorded and become the foundation of a simple, focused action plan to improve sales skills. This is not a cookie cutter approach. While different employees may state similar developmental goals, each action plan is tailored to the person's specific job role, strengths and areas of development.

This is an executive summary from a much more detailed article by Paul Robert, director of BAI Frontline Performance Solutions. Read the complete article here. Contact Robert at probert@bai.org.