I believe people get energy and feel good about themselves when they help other people.

In this episode, I’m going to show you how to get your people excited about having your clients acquire all the products and services that would help them. I believe cross-sales is a measure of trust—if they trust you, they bring everything to you immediately and continue to add more as they need it. It’s not sales…it’s a measure of great service.

Now, if you’re the kind of leader who:

• has been begging, pleading, and bribing your team through incentive payments to increase their cross-sales, and you just can’t seem to get anywhere near that average number of services—16, that they have, well, you’re going to love this…
• has staff already cross-selling 6-7 on average, but you know that’s nowhere near that 16 they need, you’re going to love this…
• has several employees that ran from the big banks whose sales system was pushy and manipulative, and they contaminated the rest of your team to believe that “sales is bad,” you’re going to love this…

As you know, this has been an industry dilemma for the 30 years I’ve been speaking at and attending bank CEO conferences—and it seems that cross-sales needles haven’t moved one bit in 3 DECADES!

There are challenges to making it happen:

1) Many people perceive “sales” as the slick presentations and pushy “we have a special on” approach, and they don’t want anything to do with it. Even though they won’t always say it…it DOES show in their results.

2) Most banks have sales attempt “battle fatigue”—millions of dollars have been spent on “attempts” at improving sales cultures in banks, and less than a few hundred have accomplished their results.

3) Still, others have been doing what they’ve been doing for so long that they’re insulted that you might be suggesting it’s not enough because they think and act as if they really do care about the customers…it just isn’t showing up in a way where the client doesn’t have to run all around town to competitors to get their banking needs met.

I’ve heard this same sad story probably 3,000 to 4,000 times in talking with bank executives for decades. It’s prevalent.

I’m now going to give you 3 steps that will help you start to move the cross-sales needle in just a few weeks.

Step 1. You’ll need to be a contrarian to what folks are telling you to be true with zero evidence of it being true. You have to forget what you believe to be true. It seems like every bank CEO does the same thing when they want cross-sales. They have three components—hire a sales training company, set goals, and create an incentive program. If that ever worked once, it would be worth a try. I have yet to have anyone tell me in all these years that it had much impact at all short term, and I have seen zero evidence that it has ever worked long term. Before you sign that contract, ask them to show you what percentage of their clients last year doubled their cross-sales on new accounts within 4-5 months. In God we trust…for all others…show me the data! Right? If it’s not over 90 percent, know that you risk losing good employees and customers. But more importantly, when it doesn’t work, you lose credibility to fix the problem going forward…which you, of course, need to do.

Step 2: In contrast to what sales training firms tell you to do, which sells their program but doesn’t deliver the results you need, you are best served by starting your sales culture transformation with something outside of sales. With one of the largest databases on bank mystery shopping, BankShop® shows that the average shop in America is a 3.5 out of 10. In fact, we mystery shop every bank before they come to our events. The ones who tell us that they have great service that doesn’t need to be improved get a thorough report of mystery shops on their teams and most average in the 3.2 to 4.2 range. Almost without exception, the banks who say “we have great people” and “we have great service” score in that range. Start by moving that needle up above 9 and do it fast—it needs to happen in six weeks. When, and only when, your people are feeling extremely confident that they are of extreme service to customers, will they be open and ready for sales. Now they realize that sales are really just the next level of taking care of people—it IS what good service entails and it sure as heck shouldn’t feel like sales.

After we do our proprietary Kick-Butt Kick-Off process, we show bank executives the few things they need to do. In 30 years, all of our banks have doubled their mystery shopping scores—and most have tripled—in fact, EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has moved to well above 9. Without a platform of knowing that every person can do the basics on the phones as they apply to help people buy, sales training will be a train wreck combination. It will be expensive for you, you’ll have disgruntled employees, and customers will feel “sold to.” And after the bad PR regarding bank cross-sales came out, that’s the LAST thing you need.

In other words, you need sales readiness to be mastered before you start sales training.

Step 3. Once you move that mystery shopping needle fast…really fast, your employees have confidence. In our seminars, we show you how to pop that needle within 6 weeks to over 9 without exception, and they always tell me that they wish they had known that 20 years ago. Now, and only now, when the birdie’s mouth is open, does the mother bird bring the first worm. By getting extraordinary results and being open to helping people buy as demonstrated by a good mystery shopping process—one that shows they care about customers—you can now embark on the sales process with the right type of blended learning and progressive accountabilities, visibility, follow up, and motivational components woven in at the right times.

Again, the 3 steps are:

1) Do a lobotomy for your executive team on what they’ve heard and believe to be true about the “sales training, incentive pay, and goals” plan that has never worked.

2) Move the client experience needle fast—really fast, so that the clients are amazed at the experience. Your people love the experience of what REAL service looks like.

3) You can start the transformative and interwoven blended learning along with increasing accountability processes.

Make sure you tune in to the next video where I’ll show you the biggest mistake most bankers make that makes it impossible to have cross-sales—now knowing how to break preoccupation with rate.