If I had a nickel for every call I’ve received over the years that went like, “Well, we spent about $250,000 on sales training. It helped for a month or two, but to be honest, we didn’t receive any return on investment,” I could bail out the financial sector myself with enough left over for pizza.

What bank exec teams fail to understand before making this tragic and often repeated error is that sales training must NEVER come first.

Without context, the content will go nowhere. It’s like pouring coffee into a cup. Pour all you want, but at some point, if you want the coffee to end up in your belly instead of all over the kitchen tile, you’ll need a bigger cup. A healthy workplace culture is precisely that—a bigger cup.

Without a healthy culture—a group of people fired up, joyful, jumping with enthusiasm to help people—you can teach skills all you want, but it is a waste of time and money. All that training will end up running down the drain.

The Gallup Report claims that for every $10,000 of payroll, the average business loses $3,400 in productivity due to people being disengaged. Banks are masters of creating disengaged employees, so there’s a good chance that the number is much higher for our industry.

Why not go after the real bottom-line impact FIRST and then think about raising the top line, knowing it has a chance of going to the bottom line?

These are the critical first steps to an ongoing process that can win deposits without paying up for them while earning all the services and products that come along with those deposits.