I believe quality loan growth is one of the top three drivers of sustainable profitability for banks.  

What if you could restructure your lending department and increase the productivity per lender by 30 to 40% or more within 12 months.  

Now if you’re the kind of leader who thinks your team kicks butt and takes names at securing quality loans at extreme premium pricing, and you’re sure it’s because of your teams execution of a particular and predictable success system, not driven by the customers recent mistakes or the economies impact, you’re about to uncover a great foundation to get even more traction within weeks.

Or maybe you are the person whose team is not quite getting the traction you want and pulling in the very best credits and premium pricing. If so, you’ll see how others who had the same problem with the same type of people transformed regular lenders into business development ninjas that pull in massive low-cost deposits.

Perhaps you have found that your folks do some of the business development activities that you want, but not enough and not in the optimal way. Stick tight because I’ll give you some ideas to turn that pattern around quickly.

Every time a bank gets serious about transforming their lending team, they hit one or more of the same four issues:

One, they start strong with a new initiative and then it fizzles out within weeks or months.
Two, they put in a new incentive program, set goals, and hope that this works. But it never does much or lasts long.
Three, they try to hire a superstar or two, but often that star is a nightmare in the making, creating your next asset quality issues or cultural disaster.
Four, or perhaps some of your people get it but many don’t, like those who expand the unimportance, so they never quite seem to have time for their sales calls. But their paperclips are sorted by color.

If you’ve had any or all of these, join the club. This has been the pattern for almost all banks for decades.

Here are three steps that will dramatically shift your results in a few weeks:

Step one – Unlike most personality assessment, hiring tools that can be cheated, or are representative of how team members see themselves or try to convince you that’s how they see themselves, reliability studies clearly demonstrate that emotional intelligence assessments are undeniably predictive about who is going to win at sales, and who isn’t. Also, who is likely to win managing accounts versus who should hunt for accounts becomes obvious.

If you are like most banks, do you have at least 30% of your team in the wrong seats? Emotional intelligence is the thinking underneath most behaviors that drives those behaviors and is therefore very difficult to change. You can’t coach height, right? Sadly, personality assessments do not have the powerful correlation to success by position that emotional intelligence assessments do. Research on thousands of lenders shows that a low risk sales profile will outsell a medium risk profile by 400% on average. What would that mean for your bottom line to quadruple the production per lender? Exactly.  

Step two – In contrast, a low sales rank that gives everyone the same training and expectations across the board, would be better served to get people in the right slots. Realize that only 6% of the population has a hunter profile. So you absolutely can’t afford to have your hunters working in busy work, loan renewals, and relationship management. A good account manager profile does everything they can to avoid business development, and a good business developer can’t be kept behind the desk talking to renewals. They are almost like different species.

Step three – Once you know how to put each person in their area of excellence, you create the process. That consists of figuring out the different responsibilities and determining when the baton is passed on a new loan to an account manager so that the client feels more love, not less. All of that takes a solid system, then you manage the system.

So three steps: 

One – Assess the emotional intelligence of your team– the only reliable way of knowing who your hunters and farmers are.
Two – Assign the right responsibility to the hunters 
Three – Create your team selling system. Team selling has replaced independent selling in all professional industries except banking. But the very best community banks are all about it, and they know how to do it right.  

By revamping your sales approach and getting people in the slots where they can win with a game plan that sets them up for success, you can transform your loan growth quickly and more importantly, predictably.  

Make sure you tune in next time where I’ll show you how to normalize big wins fast and help your lenders consistently win better deals.  

To your continued success, 

Roxanne Emmerich 

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