It’s party time… that time you’ve been waiting for to pick off the top loan customers key deposits from the weak banks around you that are floundering. You don’t need to buy them IF you know how to pull in all the business with ease. To do that, you must shatter the myths that will keep you in a state of inertia:

1. “Our people know how to sell.” In fact, they are excellent rate quoters. Most don’t even know how to break preoccupation with rate. Don’t believe it? Call your own bank. There’s nothing like irrefutable evidence.

   It’s like putting up a sign saying, “We’re not very good at what we do, so if it’s all right with you, we’d like to only do business with you if we charge less than our least competent competitor.”

   How could that possibly be happening in 2010 when we know so much about why people buy and how to sell value over rate?

2. “Our culture is ‘good enough.'” More likely, it’s not even close. Your people care… but not enough. No fire in the belly. If you’re like most, your profits are being slaughtered by the killing quartet—whining, excuses, gossip, and blame.

   Culture is the leading predictor of future growth and profitability. Yet if you’re AVERAGE, Gallup says you’re losing at least one out of every three payroll dollars due to disengaged employees. (Stop and do the math.)When your organization begins to resemble adult daycare, it’s hard to rally the troops to win great accounts.

   And if you’ve allowed a culture where an excuse is considered a great replacement for a result, it’s almost impossible to move the dime now. The recession. Low loan demand. Competition. They all made for some really great story material for why it couldn’t be done, and NOW you have to figure out how to get them to stop crafting “excuses” and understand that results rule.

3. “You can’t coach height.” Let’s face it. You have many people in the wrong seats. Most banks still use antiquated personality testing, or testing where employees are asked to assess themselves. If people really had the ability to assess their strengths and weaknesses, they would FIX their weaknesses. By simply doing emotional intelligence testing and running it against the benchmarks of the financial services industry, one Texas bank brought their people count down through attrition by 30 percent! It’s amazing what happens when you get those with a sales profile out of operations and into sales and those in sales with an operations EQ into operations.
4. “Sales is an art.” Not a chance. Sales is a system. Accounting is a system. Processing a loan is a system. Hiring is a system. If you figure out what REALLY works in all areas from sales meetings to sales calls to rate inquiries to warming campaigns and targeting high profit accounts and get complete compliance with that system, the genie will grant your wish.
5. “Sales training works.” Sales training without a cultural transformation is like eating Chinese food—you’ll be heading for the fridge in an hour. It doesn’t stick. And most sales training disengages your people and positions sales as a “dirty word.”