A community bank Wealth Management department faced flat revenue for the last few years and understood the lack of revenue growth was due to a lack of sales.
The “Story”
This organization is based in the Midwest in a relatively modest-sized community and has offices in other similar communities. They had 12 people in their Wealth Management area. No regulatory problems and reasonable profitability for an organization of their size.
Our Approach to the Situation
We started with an organization and staff assessment. We evaluated the sales and service infrastructure, surveyed and interviewed the entire team.
The findings from the assessment were that there was virtually no sales infrastructure: No activity management system at all, the pipeline was really a (short) list of people that had been contacted recently and there was little or no sales coaching occurring. Another interesting finding: Only one of the 12 employees identified new business generation as part of their primary responsibility.
One of the great things about our job is that every situation is different and has different solutions. A unique finding in this organization was a lack of confidence (and lack of support) from their investment outsourcing partner. We helped them through the process of identifying a new partner and then through the conversion. It was a amazing how the new partner revitalized their excitement and enthusiasm for business development.
We separated those staff members who were not in a position to develop new business from those that were and did some basic sales training to get them comfortable with the idea. We then identified the sales coach and defined the coaching process. They started weekly call in meetings with the sales team and bi-weekly 1:1 calls or meetings. Learn more in our ‘Client Builder’ Sales Management section: Coaching for Results
The Impact!
Sales are up 300% over the previous year! There are a lot of other positive impacts from the effort including (morale improvement, budgetary flexibility, staff hiring) but the bottom line and top line is that sales are up tremendously and the pipeline and referral flow suggests the results are sustainable.