What the Top 1% of Banks Do That the Other 99% Still Don’t Get
In this video, I discuss how the top 1% of community banks are not working harder than their competitors—they’re working smarter. By leveraging a high-performance...
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 team 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 and see extreme value, 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.
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 THREE DECADES!
I’ve heard these same sad stories probably 3,000-4,000 times in talking with bank executives for decades. It’s prevalent.
You have to forget what you believe to be true regarding cross-sales or what folks are telling you is true—with zero evidence. Seems like every bank CEO does the same thing when they want cross-sales.
There are three components:
IF that ever worked, it would be worth a try. But 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 with a sales trainer, 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 70–90%, know that you risk losing good employees and customers. Once the inevitable failure happens, you also risk losing your credibility to fix the problem going forward—which you of course need to do.
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 ten.
In fact, we mystery shop every bank that attends our events prior to them attending. Those 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. Most average in the 3.2 to 4.2 range.
Almost without exception, the banks that say, “we have great people” and “we have great service” score in that range. Start by moving that needle up to over nine and do it fast—it needs to happen in six weeks and you can’t miss getting it right the first time or the second attempt is about three times more difficult.
When, and only when, your people are feeling extremely confident that they are being of extreme service to customers will they be open and ready for sales, because now they realize that sales is really just the next level of taking care of people. It IS what good service entails and it sure the 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, we haven’t had one bank that hasn’t doubled their mystery shopping scores—and over 92% have tripled.
In fact, ALL of them moved to well above nine. Without a foundation of knowing that every person can do the basics on the phones as they help people buy, sales training will be an expensive train-wreck for you, combined with disgruntled employees and customers who feel “sold to.” After the bad PR regarding bank cross-sales that came out recently, that’s the LAST thing you need.
In other words, you need sales readiness to be mastered before you start sales training.
Once they’ve moved that mystery shopping needle fast—really fast—they have confidence.
In our seminars, we show you how to pop that needle past nine without exception— within six weeks! 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 through 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. One with the right type of blended learning and progressive stage-appropriate accountability, visibility, follow up, and motivational components weaved in at all the right times.
1) Do a lobotomy for your executive team on everything they have heard and believe to be true about the “sales training, incentive pay and goals” plan that has never worked.
2) Then, move the client experience needle fast—really fast—so that clients are amazed at the experience AND your people are loving the experience of what REAL service looks like. Start this with real data from mystery shopping.
3) Then you can start the transformative and interweaved blended learning along with increasing accountability process.
Make sure you tune in to the next episode as we continue the cross-sales conversation. I’ll go in-depth on the biggest mistake made by most bankers that makes it impossible to have cross-sales: not knowing how to break preoccupation with rate.
To your continued success,
Roxanne Emmerich
P. S. Challenging times are proven as the moment to pull ahead. It’s your time to snap up low-cost deposits and seize your competitor’s best customers—but not if you have “order takers” in front of your customers and prospects. My Breakthrough Banking™ Blueprint Conference is designed especially to explore what smart banks do during tumultuous times. Register today.
In this video, I discuss how the top 1% of community banks are not working harder than their competitors—they’re working smarter. By leveraging a high-performance...
Net interest margin is under pressure—and if your bank is still waiting on rate changes to save your profitability, you’re already behind. In this sharp, no-fluff...
Bankers, let me ask you a brutal but necessary question:Why are you still playing checkers while the top-performing banks are playing 4D chess with deposit growth? If...
Do you agree that high quality customers love high quality attention? Let's explore how you can transform your safety and profitability by creating the kind of...
What if you can use extreme differentiation to get 150 basis points or more on the loan side and improve your deposit pricing at the same time? If you're the kind of...
You deserve to get paid more. Rate matching is the most destructive force in community banking today. And because of it, as a community bank, you are underpaid for the...
Does every team member on your team know how they tie to profit? I mean really know? When a study published in Businessweek revealed they had asked 6,000 employees, "Do...
Everyone has patterns of disbelief. Some people believe that in politics, there is one side or the other, and they're unwilling to look at the alternative. Still others...
I hear the same thing everywhere I go—"We need to build an accountability culture!" Great idea, right? But here’s the problem: we’ve been saying this for decades, and...
I have a book that I love—a book I read a couple of times last year and still reference often. It’s called Intelligent Thinking—which, let’s be honest, sounds like a...