I believe that progress begets progress and success begets success.

In this episode, I’ll show you how you can create a series of successes that opens the way for even more impactful ones.

If you stay up at night thinking about how to drive through a stubborn performance barrier, listening to this episode will give you some solid steps to finally achieve that breakthrough.

If your people are progressing, and you know it isn’t driven by competitive or economic changes but rather solid performance improvements, you’ve come to the right place. I’m going to show you how to build on those performance breakthroughs to get even more impact.

Finally, if you have been having performance breakthroughs in some areas but not others, then I’ll show you how to create consistency in needle movement in the areas you deem most important.

There are a few challenges to building a performance breakthrough system—one where the progress continues and then accelerates.

First, it’s hard to know where you can get some home runs, and without home runs to build on, you have a big problem. Attempting subsequent rollouts without achieving profound successes on your first rollouts borders on insanity. This simply teaches your people to learn how to do the “slow walk”—waiting you out as you give up again and again. It’s called, “learned helplessness.”

Another challenge is making sure that you actually get that home run on your first rollout—one where a needle might double or triple in less than eight weeks. Without that, you have no foundation for your future rollouts on the metrics that drive profit even more.

Still another challenge is figuring out the right sequence of rollouts for the next level, based on whether you are trying to move cross-sales, premium pricing, deposit or loan growth metrics, or whatever matters to you at the time. Order matters and you can really mess things up by getting things out of order.

These same three challenges seem to raise their ugly heads at every bank.

I’m now going to give you three steps that will provide you with a platform for moving some needles in the next few weeks and accelerating even more progress from each level of progress.

Step 1: So many sales training attempts fail because the sales training company is hired, people learn a few “tricks,” needles pop up only while the training is happening, and then people go right back to all their old behaviors. You are better served with a proven system of predictable transformation on the first needle rollout you attempt. For example, if you roll out cross-sales on new accounts, you better have a plan that predictably doubles them within five months. If you don’t, you’ve just given your team even more evidence that it can’t be done, and your next attempt will be infinitely harder as you then must battle their lack of faith.

Step 2: You must have a system that continues to move the results for that needle. If you move cross-sales on new accounts from 2.2 to 2.5 the first week and then get to 4.5 by five months, then you can take it to 6 or even 8 within 12 months, as many of our clients have.

But realize that it is not the sales training alone that can get that accomplished. It is a clear and proven system to coach, celebrate, have accountability, and enroll their hearts in the impact to help clients rather than “selling them” while creating the right systems of visibility. Those must be combined with blended learning—the optimal way to learn, with onsite learning, impactful accountability-based Internet learning, and other learning tools—all implemented at the same time as coaching, visibility, sales meetings, and more. Repetition is the law of learning. If people aren’t relearning every week, they lose momentum and results drop like a rock. You know what happens to your body when you skip the gym—it doesn’t matter that you went a month ago. The same principle applies here.

Step 3: Once that first needle skyrockets, put in place the “advancement system” to further advance that needle while you roll out the next needle—one that impacts profitability even more. Because the team has seen the first several needle rollouts have at least doubled, they now expect that they can do the same with the next ones as they are rolled out. Now we’re playing ball.

So, let’s recap the steps. Unlike sales training firms that attempt sales training in a vacuum of only training without marketing, strategy, cultural breakthroughs of ways of being, accountability, and blended systems for learning, OR the other high-risk approach of hiring a new “sales leader”, if you’re really serious about fixing sales, you need a holistic system with intentional congruence between sales, service, marketing, strategy, accountability systems, celebration systems, and more.

Step two is to make sure that you have a combination of educational modalities—blended learning—so that mastery of learning is possible.

Finally, step three, be ready to move the next needles with the right system and implement integrated systems that keep the needles up. Then, as they say, just rinse and repeat.

The key here is that you don’t want to mess this up. If you have anything other than a resounding success when you attempt a sales breakthrough, you’ve lost more than just additional profit and growth—you’ve lost your people’s confidence that you and they can really do this. That starts a downward spiral that takes millions off the bottom line for years!

In the next episode, I’ll show you how you can stop the “middle management breakdown” and get your managers to truly manage accountability to what you say matters.