Here’s How Banks Double Their Cross-Sales in 4 Months

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I believe that great organizations have mastery of 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 person who:

• Has had a few false attempts at fixing the “order taking” pain point at your bank, you’ll love this episode because you don’t need to give up OR take it in the chin one more time with another false attempt where someone tells you they can rope the moon…but they don’t own the rope.
• Has already moved the cross-sales needle up to well over 6 but worry about how to keep it all going, so you can’t have to go through that expense and time investment all over again, you’ll enjoy knowing there is a way to keep that needle up going forward with great consistency.
• 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.

There are some unique challenges that banks face to keep their cross-sales numbers up after they move them up:

1) As new people are hired, each one brings in the potential to sabotage your good results—sometimes knowingly, because they don’t believe they can “sell” and they try to convert others to their religion. Others do it unknowingly because they don’t have a complete understanding of how to do it, so they don’t get results. And others see they haven’t been “dealt with” so they lower their standards to the lowest common denominator.

2) Without a clear understanding of organizational behavior and industrial psychology, systems are thrown together that don’t work, or worse yet, sabotage the results and create a mess.

3) Without the right things, at the right time, in the right amount, many banks are playing with dynamite—hoping for a good result and not knowing that they can do things that cause a mass exodus of good people because they entered the wrong element of accountability at the wrong time and things will go boooom in the night.

Most banks have experienced at least one of these. Let me give you 3 proven steps that have helped banks move their cross-sales needles fast, but more importantly, keep them there AND continue to advance them above 7 and beyond.

Step 1. In contrast to fuzzy goals, some sales training, and then the “hope, wish, and see what happens” approach, you need to do research on what systems really get results in banking. They must show that the numbers are up and stay up for years…or move on fast.

Step 2. UNLIKE so many “rah-rah, happy-happy” sales training systems, you need more meat on the bones of your sales system. You have to realize that successful businesses have complex systems, and one of the most important success systems you can build is an ongoing system of integration of education, accountability, recognition, coaching, celebration, practice—each of these having very important distinctions. This goes beyond the head of retail but is an executive team responsibility to build these accountability processes so that everyone knows how they tie to profit every day and has mastery of how to use them, as well as the systems to keep them from throwing the ball in the gutter and losing the momentum. A few trips to the gym only create results for a short period of time…you need to keep going to keep building muscle and stamina. Why would this be any different?

Step 3: Instead of having your leadership team attend more conferences about why it is important to do this, 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 of the components for a holistic and predictable success machine, people rush to me at the breaks saying, “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 didn’t understand the organizational psychology.” It’s not their fault…nobody has been teaching bankers organizational psychology. It’s like they were using a hammer to put in screw bolts. If it worked, it would have been an anomaly, right? They needed the right system so that they could get a chance of their hard work actually working.

So just three steps: 1) Find out what is really working in banking to move cross-sales needles, 2) move from “rah-rah, happy-happy” to a proven system of accountability that builds confidence instead of scares people away and 3) invest in your executive team to make sure they can master the basic understandings of organizational development and build a sustainable and ever-advancing system with extraordinary, yet predictable, results so that you can have the peace of mind that you will be successful during good times and bad.

Make sure you tune in to the next episode where I’ll show you how to best optimize the concerns for both your customers and employees about the “big bank sales practices” that hit the media and caused concerns.