When I started as a lender, I got a briefcase, got in my car, and went up and down the street calling on folks hoping that they would bring their commercial and agricultural relationships to me.

Well, sometimes they did, and sometimes they didn’t. I thought I was doing the best thing possible because I watched what everybody else was doing. I did the same thing and got the same middle-of-the-road results.

I didn’t know then what we know now.

Harvard Business Review has a great article about how team selling outperforms individual selling by a truckload. The reality is, we’ve got to get good at team selling and banking. And yet most banks still think that team selling is simply, “Okay Joey and Jim Bob: you’re out together. You’re Team One, and Susie and Julie, you’re Team Two.” 

Putting two people together is not team selling. Team selling is so much more sophisticated than that.

If you’re going to go out and land those deals with a 90% close rate while you command premium pricing and bring the entire relationship on board, your team selling system must be meticulously crafted and executed with a skill set that is unheard of right now. All people on that team must know how to work together, hold each other accountable, and keep each other tightly focused on the process to make sure that no step gets missed or done poorly or incorrectly. 

If you go back to any lost deal and do an autopsy, you will find exactly when, where and how you missed certain parts of the sales process. And that’s why you lost the deal. So team selling isn’t just about putting a couple of folks together and sending them out together. There’s so much more to it.

Team selling rocks compared to individual selling.

I should also mention that team selling is the secret behind many of your competitors that are rocking their numbers while you’re wondering what they’re doing that you’re not. How do I know? I have a session coming up in April at the BEST BANKS IN AMERICA™ SUPER CONFERENCE  where we’re going to spend an entire day just teaching the mechanics of what’s working today for those best banks in America. And those mechanics include team selling.

By the way, these are the banks that are commanding 4, 4 ½, even 5% net interest margins in very difficult times. Learning how to deal with these difficult times, commanding your pricing regardless of the times, and reaching your loan growth goals can be achieved once you master the team selling process. 

I can’t wait to meet you at the superconference in Naples on April 21st and 22nd, when we’ll go over it all. See you there.  

– Roxanne Emmerich

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

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April 21-22, 2022. It’s the ONLY Conference for top-performing banks—and those that aspire to join them! Register now!