How to Double Cross-Sales at Your Bank in 5 Months

I believe that truly great organizations have mastered two things—great people and great systems.

In this session, I’m going to share with you a system that has consistently and predictably doubled cross-sales in 4–5 months.

If you’re the kind of leader:

• Who has had a few false attempts at fixing the “order taking” pain point at your bank, you’ll love what I’m going to share. You don’t need to give up OR take it on the chin again with another false attempt where a sales trainer tells you they can rope the moon but forgets to mention that they don’t own a rope.
• Or maybe you’re the leader who has already moved the cross-sales needle up to well over six, but you worry about how to keep it all going. You know you can’t go through that expense and time investment all over again, so you’ll love knowing there is a way to keep that needle moving up consistently that works every time in every bank that implements it.
• Or maybe you’re the kind of leader who hasn’t yet tried to improve cross-sales and hasn’t embarked on any sales training yet. Consider yourself lucky because you have a clean slate to do it right the first time without the heavy weight of the “this too shall pass” mantra.

There are some unique challenges that banks face to keep their cross-sales numbers up after they’ve done the heavy lifting.

• First, each new hire brings in the potential to sabotage your good results. Sometimes they don’t believe they can “sell” so they knowingly try to convert others to their religion. They do it unknowingly because they don’t have a complete understanding of how to sell, so they don’t get results. Others see that there haven’t been consequences for lack of results, so they lower their standards to the lowest common denominator.
• Next, without a clear understanding of organization behavior and industrial psychology, systems are thrown together that don’t work, or worse yet, sabotage the results and create a mess.
• Lastly, without the right amount and the right things at the right time, many banks are playing with dynamite while hoping for a good result. They don’t know that they can do things that cause a mass exodus of good people because they could enter the wrong element of accountability at the wrong time, and make things go boom in the night.

Most banks have experienced at least one of these, so let’s deal with all of them now.

Let me give you three proven steps that have helped banks move their cross-sales needles fast but, more importantly, keep them stable AND continue to sustainably advance them above seven and beyond.

Step 1: In contrast to the traditional “set goals, do some sales training, and then put incentive pay in place” followed by the “hope, wish and see what happens” approach that has been tried by thousands of banks only to fail 100% of the time, you’ll want to be sure that the process creates a predictable and sustainable transformation of results specifically in community banks. If the trainer can’t prove that the numbers go up and stay up for hundreds of banks, you’re better to do nothing.

Step 2: UNLIKE so many rah-rah, happy-happy sales training systems, you need more meat on the bones. You have to realize that successful businesses do have some complex systems. One of the most important things you can build is an ongoing success system integrating education, accountability, recognition, coaching, celebration and practice.

This goes beyond the head of retail. It’s an executive team’s responsibility to build these accountability processes so that everyone knows how they tie in to profit every day, and to make sure that the accountability is welcome and embraced because the appropriate psychology is managed, and steps are properly timed.

They have mastered how to do that and the systems that keep them from throwing the ball in the gutter and losing momentum. A few trips to the gym only creates results for short period of time. You need to keep going to truly build muscle and stamina. Why would this be any different?

Step 3: Instead of the having your leadership team attend more conferences about why it is important do to this, or implement research sales software thinking that it might actually help (which it doesn’t), instead show them HOW to do this.

When I show executives at my conferences how they can apply a proprietary implementation formula that does things in the right order and weaves together all the components for a holistic and predictable success machine, people rush to me at the breaks. They say things like, “Whoa, who’d have known? We were working so hard trying to fix this and I can see we couldn’t get results because we weren’t understanding the organizational psychology.”

It’s not their fault. Nobody has been teaching bankers organizational psychology. It’s like they were using a hammer on screw bolts. They needed the right system so that they could get a chance for their hard work to actually pay off.

A lot to digest there. But it’s just three steps:

1) Find out what is really working in community banking to move cross-sales needles.
2) Move from rah-rah, happy-happy to a proven system of accountability that builds confidence instead of scaring team members away.
3) Invest in your executive team so they can master a basic understanding of organizational development. Task them with building a sustainable and ever-advancing system with extraordinary yet predictable results. The outcome will be your peace of mind, knowing that you will be successful during good times and bad.

Make sure you tune into the next video. It’s all about the “big bank sales practices” that have raised an outcry among the general public. I’ll show you how to best address the concerns about these issues for both your customers and employees.