Session Description:

Sales process and the customer experience ARE the brand and a critically important foundation of differentiation.  Consistent rituals and familiar encounters reassure customers.  Executive conference board research indicates that 53% of customer satisfaction with vendors is driven by their experience in the sales process. 

Banking companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars in brand advertising to differentiate themselves but often leave to chance a critical element of their brands—their sales processes. Experience any number of banks, and it becomes painfully apparent that their sales team members do very little that’s different, one bank to another. This is largely because bank managers hold their salespeople accountable for their results, not for how they produce them.

Service companies that focus on service branding—like Federal Express, Harrah’s, and British Airways—have defined processes and standards to provide this consistency and assurance. Major accounting and consulting firms use these principles and have rigorously defined their client interaction processes. Rituals have become so ingrained that the term “McKinsey grunt” has been used to describe the frequent use of “uh-huh” by consultants from McKinsey and Company when listening to their clients.
When banks allow salespeople to define their own methods for working with customers, their sales team members often create a portfolio of personal brands—the opposite of the uniform brand toward which most banks strive. When this happens:

• Customers feel confused about the message and rethink continued loyalty.

• Companies become vulnerable when the key salespeople leave, especially when customers follow sales reps or consultants because they represent the brand.

• Each new rep placed in the field has a different approach than the previous one, which muddies brand messages.
   

In this session, we’ll discuss four critical steps to translating and delivering a brand to the field:

1. Translate brand attributes and customer preferences into a detailed description of a customer experience.

2. Define sales processes and activities necessary to create the customer-preferred, brand-aligned customer experience routinely and predictably.

3. Define and track measures showing how well sellers’ activities match defined processes and standards and whether customers respond positively.

4. Relentlessly inspect and correct.
    

This session is appropriate for senior financial executives with responsibility for Customer Experience, Sales, Acquisition, Marketing, Retail Banking, Market Research and Strategy Groups.
 

About Nick T. Milleri:
Nick Miller and Clarity accelerate bank sales to small and medium-sized businesses to generate more profitable relationships, faster.

A frequent at small business banking conferences, Nick has been published or quoted in journals including Sales & Marketing Management, Banking Strategies, Commercial Lending Review, The RMA Journal, and American Banker. His articles include: Selling in Tough Times, for small business bankers and commercial bankers; Trusted Advisors in the Small Business World; How Retail and Small Business Partnerships Increase Sales (coauthored with Les Dinkin); Finding the Keys to Sales Excellence (co-authored with Charles Wendel)

Nick began his banking career at The First National Bank of Chicago in 1973. His experience there focused primarily on real estate construction lending and workouts. In 1976, he joined the management consulting practice at Touche Ross & Co., specializing in financial services companies. After three years with Touche, he joined Omega Performance Corporation, providing consulting services and training services to business and consumer banking groups in the U.S. and Canada. After 14 years with Omega, Nick founded Clarity in 1991.

Nick earned a B.A. in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA in finance from The University of Chicago. He is a decent acoustic guitar player and singer and, when pressed, can hold his own on the baritone horn. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts with his family, six guitars, a baritone horn, and a tuba.


About Clarity Advantage:
Clarity Advantage helps banks sell to small and medium-sized companies, their owners, and employees to generate more profitable banking relationships, faster. Our clients range in size from 30 branches to over 1,000 branches and are comprised of banks in the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.
Challenges Our Clients Face
Our clients are dealing with challenges that include:

• Penetrating small business relationships to capture the business, personal, and employee banking relationships
• Launching small business initiatives in their branch networks to boost acquisition, retention, and penetration of small business prospects and clients
• More rapidly penetrating and retaining existing small business relationships
  Achieving a consistent look and feel to the sales process across diverse geographies
• Refocusing their sales teams to identify and attract companies for their deposits and use of cash management services rather than loans

We help relationship management and product sales forces that call on small and medium-sized companies and consumers translate their visions and goals into specific tools, processes, activities, and behaviors through which they roll out their strategies or implement structural or process improvements.

We are currently working with a bank that is reengineering its sales force structure and launching a new branding effort in its market. The business banking relationship managers with whom we are working will be receiving on average 40 new clients that are being transferred from the commercial line of business.

The business banking segment manager and Clarity have been working to define the sales process and methods that will be used with these incoming transfers as well as with the business banking book of business and prospects.
Our mission with them is to help boost the retention of transferred accounts and to boost the average penetration rates among business banking accounts, generally. In addition, we are seeking to interpret the bank's brand through a specific set of sales process methods and behaviors that clearly differentiate this bank from both its larger and smaller competitors.

 

www.clarityadvantage.com
 

 

 

Click Here to Register