Why Your Credit Union Sales Program May Be Lacking Results

Sales are vital to the success of your credit union. Your institution requires new accounts and loans to generate the income necessary to cover expenses and build capital. Despite the technological advances in marketing and alternate delivery methods, branch employees continue to be the main point of contact for many of your members. A successful sales program is contingent upon tellers and member service representatives effectively referring products and services, opening accounts and closing new loans.

Over the past few years I have worked with many credit unions struggling with implementing or enhancing its sales program. As a training professional who has spent 12 years in the industry, created successful sales training programs and published a book on needs-based selling, credit unions often reach out to me to help improve their sales results. In my experience, your credit union’s sales program may be lacking results because it is falling short in these five areas:

1. Lack of Product Knowledge

Employees must be thoroughly educated on their credit union’s products and services, including product features and benefits, and how each impacts the member’s financial well-being. Provide incentives for employees to use the credit union’s products themselves. Product knowledge is not just about being able to state the product’s minimum balance, fees and perks. Employees must be able to align the member to the appropriate product to fit their financial needs. A good training exercise would be to offer a scenario where a member has a specific financial need, and have the employee describe which product would be the best fit along with the reason(s) why.

2. Lack of Understanding What the Member Cares About Most

Members’ needs and focus changes from one individual to the next. What’s important to a member one day may change the next depending on their personal situation. Employees must be able to communicate effectively with a member and decipher clues to understand what it is the member cares about most. Good sales techniques follow Dr. Stephen Covey’s principle to “seek first to understand, then be understood.” By doing so, employees will focus on what is truly important to the member, and refer products and services accordingly. If not, the employee will try to force a product on a member, creating a bad situation for the member, employee and credit union.

3. Lack of Employee Confidence

Some employees consider asking probing or personal questions regarding salary, family and existing debt to be intrusive. The reason is likely related to a lack of confidence, in which the employee does not consider themselves to be a banking expert. Without asking important questions, employees cannot uncover members’ financial needs, and the products and services necessary to provide a solution.

Consider what happens when you are sick and go to the doctor. The doctor asks you questions and performs an evaluation, which may include placing instruments in your mouth, ears and nose. Talk about intrusive! Of course, patients expect this, because they consider the doctor an expert required to perform an evaluation to determine why we are sick. Credit union employees must think of themselves as an expert in their branch, asking questions to perform their own financial evaluation of the member.

4. Lack of Effective Coaching

Managers cannot coach based on a weekly or monthly sales report. To understand how the employee is performing, managers must observe behavior, effectively inspecting what they expect from their employees. Achieving a goal is a by-product of successfully performing specific behaviors. Effective sales requires an employee to project a professional appearance, communicate confidence, build rapport, ask open-ended questions, uncover the member’s need, present in a way that makes sense to the member and overcome objections. The only way for a manager to determine if these behaviors are being completed is to observe the employee in action, and offer direct and clear feedback on how to improve behavior.

5. Lack of Accountability

I recently asked a credit union executive what happens when employees don’t reach their sales goal. Her answer: “Nothing.” Employees who are not held accountable for performance will likely perform to their comfort level. Holding employees accountable is not just looking for ways to punish. Accountability also includes offering recognition and incentives when employees are meeting and exceeding expectations. When it comes to accountability, I’ve learned what gets monitored gets completed, and what gets rewarded gets repeated.

It is crucial you have these five components in place for your sales program to succeed. You won’t realize goals without providing the resources to train, develop and coach employees; observe behavior; and hold employees accountable for their actions. A program lacking in these areas will ultimately lack in results.

Michael Patterson is a Speaker, Facilitator & Success Coach at Mike Patterson Partner in Learning LLC. He can be reached at mike@mikepat.com.