Recently, I shared 5 key things that have helped us grow and serve others in the last 30 years, hoping they will be helpful to others on their journey. Now, I'm taking a deeper dive into the 5 key takeaways with a more detailed on each. Here's #3: Curveballs.

Recently, I shared 5 key things that have helped us grow and serve others in the last 30 years, hoping they will be helpful to others on their journey. Now, I'm taking a deeper dive into the 5 key takeaways with a more detailed on each. Here's #4: Relationships. 

Last week, I shared 5 key things that have helped us grow and serve others in the last 30 years, hoping they will be helpful to others on their journey. Now, I'm taking a deeper dive into the 5 key takeaways with a more detailed on each. Starting with #5: Focus on the Best Version of Yourself. 

Transcript:

Recently, we published a video celebrating our 30 years in business, and I appreciate everybody that's followed up and made comments and gave us a thumbs up. It certainly has been a joy, hasn't been without its challenges, but because of the great relationships we have with clients and friends around the country who have been able to succeed and grow, add to our staff, and have impact on a lot of people's lives. So I thank you. Our team thanks you.

So let's go ahead and get on today with these lessons. In that video, we talked about five important lessons that we've picked up throughout the years, and today's purpose is to go a little bit deeper, dive into some of those lessons and see where we go from there. So I'm going to go backwards and start with number five.

Number five is focus on the best version of yourself. And when we talked about the video, we discussed the spiritual, physical, mental, emotional, all those sorts of things. And that goes without saying. But my focus here today is, how about professionally? Are you operating as the best version of yourself? And one of the ways you might want to take a look at that is, well, okay, I'm hitting my goals. Well, is that why you got into the business? My experience is that a lot of people who end up in selling, end up as a lender, end up in wealth management, do so for other reasons other than I hope I can hit my goal. You're trying to provide for family. You're trying to have an impact on your community. You have loyalty to your company. You want to help them grow. And there's lots of components to that. And this isn't just selling.

Are you developing the relationships you have? Are you as good internally with your support group as you could be? Do you have people in the community that supports you and surround you and help you accomplish the things you're trying to accomplish?

And so if you take a look at different ways that you might create your own scorecard and your own report card like you did in school, then come up with your own criteria, I'm not going to try and dictate what that criteria ought to be and then score yourself on a scale of one to ten. I like ten because that's just the way my head works. And you go through when we do this. Typically in organizations, people end up with about a seven. I asked them to put a zero at the end. That makes it a 70. And I'm going to date myself. Now, when I was in school, the 70 meant average, I'm pretty sure that none of you got into the business that you're in to be average. So the next step would be well, how do I Close that gap? How do I go from my 7, 8.5, whatever the number is, to the absolute best version of yourself? So let's start with that.

Stay tuned for #4: Relationships.

This year, we're celebrating a huge milestone- 30 Years of helping our clients sell, coach and hire better. In 1993, we decided to start our own training and development company – it was a bold move back then. In this video, I share 5 things that have helped us grow and serve others in these 30 years in the hopes they will be helpful to others on their journey. A big shout-out to all the wonderful people and clients who have made the past 30 years extraordinary. We look forward to the next 30!

Tony Cole

The sales management activities that we are performing today are creating the results we are achieving today. Many or few, consistent or irregular, planned or impromptu, the behaviors and activities that we, as sales managers, use to motivate, train and hold our relationship managers accountable are at least partly responsible for the success of those we manage. In other words, what activities are you doing now that are creating your current unsatisfactory results?

The old adage, “If you do what you’ve always done, you will get what you’ve always gotten” comes to mind. It is up to us as sales leaders to set higher standards for the behaviors and activities and hold people accountable so that we get better results. So, in the interest of bettering your bankers, we hope you will approach the following discussion with an open mind. A characteristic of truly successful individuals is that they welcome the opportunity to explore and implement new ideas and practices.

1. Hiring

Great sales managers understand hiring lenders, for example, requires a different process than hiring support or admin personnel. No other role in a company faces the same challenges and deals with the same performance pressures as the lenders. No one faces greater scrutiny and is on a shorter leash than those tasked with developing and bringing in new relationships. The hiring behaviors of great sales managers include: 

• Writing a great job attraction post – specific skills exhibited by top lenders
• Utilizing a pre-hire, sales specific, evaluation is the only way to know
• Having an initial phone interview to discover how good the banker is on the phone
• Conducting interviews like auditions – make it as tough as a prospect will

2. Offer and On-boarding

When the manager finally selects the candidate based on the above steps, the final step in the hiring is to have an effective offer meeting that includes the following:

• They make sure the candidate is prepared to make a decision when the offer is made to avoid using the offer to get a better deal from the current bank
• They lay out all the expectations for sales activity, sales goals, sales meetings, use of CRM, and define being a good citizen and how they will be managed and coached
• They gain agreement on all the conditions of taking the role, and then to solidify the agreement they ask this question: “Are you sure?” To which the candidate will say yes. They then explain that it’s ‘going to be hard’ and then don’t say another word to let that statement sink in and see what they say. Ask them, “Will you allow me to coach you?”

The three behaviors are critical. The reason they are critical is that many candidates that become 'new hires' fail especially in the execution area of sales activity - hitting goals, attending sales meetings, using your CRM and responding to your managing style and culture.

3. They Manage

Great banking sales managers understand what Jim Collins means when he states: “There is no such thing as micro – managing. You are either managing or you are not managing.” Effective Sales Managed Environments must include managing behavior. The behavior goals must be introduced in the very beginning of the new relationship manager’s career, and then yearly at least 1 sales cycle before the end of the sales year. The following discussions must take place:

• What sales results are attached to the words extraordinary, excellent, good, poor, and failing results? Setting goals.
• What activities and success formula will they need to arrive at the outcome the banker has committed to?
• Making sure they are committed to the activity by asking: Are you sure? And then stating: 'This is going to be hard."
• Discussing what happens when the data is telling you that your new hire is off track. Great managers get permission to coach salespeople when they are failing.

4. They Coach

As stated by Henry Kissinger; “The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” Great leaders reap their rewards by gaining success through others and by developing others to be their absolute best selves. Sales coaching includes:

• 1-on-1 coaching sessions to improve skill and change behaviors
• Pre- and post-call strategy sessions to improve the probability of success of each opportunity the lender is calling on
• Meeting quarterly to review activity numbers against actual results to discuss success, where they are headed and gaining discrepancy between the behavior numbers and the sales results

5. They Verify

A strong sales leader has Healthy Skepticism. This doesn’t mean that they don’t believe what their bankers are telling them or what they are reporting. They have a Ronald Reagan approach: Trust but verify. Great sales managers stay off the “They’re going to make it because they have a big deal that is about to close” bandwagon.

If you and your bank must drive better sales performance, consider these 5 behaviors. You can also pull down our eBook The Extraordinary Sales Manager for more ideas.