I believe progress begets progress and success begets success.

In this episode, I’ll show you how you can create a series of successes that open the way for even more impactful successes later on.

On the flipside, stumble once and all your hard work up until then could come tumbling down. I’ll show you how to avoid that eventuality too.

If you’re the kind of leader who is up at night thinking about how to drive through a stubborn performance barrier, listening to this will give you some solid steps to finally have that breakthrough.

If instead, you are one whose people are progressing, and you know it isn’t driven by competitive or economic changes but rather solid performance improvements, you came to the right place because I’ll show you how to build on those performance breakthroughs for even more impact.

Then again, perhaps you have been having performance breakthroughs in some areas but not all. If so, I’ll show you how to create consistency in needle movement in the areas you deem most important—so keep listening.

There are a few challenges to building a performance breakthrough system—one where the progress is fast, then accelerates and sustains for years:

• First, it’s hard to know which things you can get some home runs on, and without home runs to build on, you have a big problem. Subsequent roll outs without profound success on your first roll outs borders on insanity. They simply teach your people to learn how to do the “slow walk”—waiting you out as you give up again and again. It’s called “learned helplessness.”
• The second challenge is making sure that you actually GET that home run on your first roll out—one where a needle might double or triple in less than eight weeks. Without that, you have no foundation for your future rollouts on the metrics that drive profit even more.
• The final challenge is figuring out the right sequence of roll outs for the next level based on whether you are trying to move cross-sales, premium pricing, deposit, or loan growth metrics—whatever matters to you at the time. You can REALLY mess things up by getting things out of order.

These same three challenges seem to raise their ugly head at every bank.

I’m now going to give you three steps that will give you a platform for moving some needles in the next few weeks, and accelerating even more progress at each level: 

Step 1: UNLIKE so many failed sales training attempts where the company is hired, people learn a few “tricks,” needles pop up for a short time (and only while the training is happening), and then people go right back to all their old behaviors, you are better served with a proven system of predictable transformation on the first needle roll out you attempt.

For example, if you roll out cross-sales on new accounts, you better have a plan that predictably doubles your results within five months. If you don’t, you’ve just given your team even more evidence that it can’t be done, and your next attempt is infinitely harder as you then battle the belief system of hopelessness.

Step 2: You must have a system that CONTINUES to move the results for that needle. If you move cross-sales on new accounts from 2.2–2.5 the first week, and then get to 4.5 within five months, then you can take it to six, or even eight, within 12 months as many of our clients have.

But you must realize that you can’t accomplish that with sales training alone. It is the clear and proven system to coach, celebrate, have accountability, enroll their hearts in the impact to HELP clients instead of “SELL them,” and create the RIGHT systems of visibility, and more.

That MUST be combined with blended learning—the optimal way to learn that includes onsite learning, impactful accountability-based internet learning, seminars and other learning tools ALL implemented at the same time as coaching, visibility, sales meetings and more.

Repetition is the law of learning. If people aren’t relearning every week, they lose it and results drop like a rock. You know what happens to your body when you skip the gym—it doesn’t matter that you went a month ago. The same universal principle applies here.

Step 3: Once that first needle skyrockets, put in place the “advancement system” to further advance that needle WHILE you roll out the next needle—one that impacts profitability even more. Now, because the team has seen that the first several needle roll outs have at least doubled, they now EXPECT they can do the same with the next one, and the one after that, and so on. NOW we’re playing ball.

So, let’s recap the steps.

1) Traditional sales training firms attempt their work in a vacuum of only training without marketing, strategy, organizational development strategies, cultural breakthroughs, accountability and blended systems for learning.
The other high-risk approach is hiring a new “sales leader” where all the responsibility and influence is dependent on one person. Both methods are destined to fail based on the thousands of banks who had exactly that result.

If you’re really serious about fixing sales, you need a holistic system with intentional congruence between sales, service, marketing, strategy, accountability systems, celebration systems, organizational development and more.

2) Then make sure that you have a combination of educational modalities—called blended learning—so that mastery of all the strategies, information and more is implemented.

3) Be ready to move the next needles with the right system and implement integrated systems that keep that needle up. Then, just lather, rinse and repeat.

The key here is that you don’t want to mess this up. If you have anything other than a resounding success when you attempt a sales breakthrough, you’ve lost more than just the additional profit and growth. You’ve lost the confidence of your people that you and they can really do this. That starts a downward spiral that takes millions off the bottom line for YEARS!

In the next episode, I’ll show you how you can stop the “middle management breakdown” and get your managers to truly manage accountability to what you say matters. You don’t want to miss it.

– Roxanne Emmerich

Please watch the video above and share it with your exec team and board.