ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION: Implanting Sales Culture.

• Author: Beavers-Moss, Deborah
• Position: Banks

Four bankers from different parts of the country discuss how their institutions are encouraging the growth of sales culture--with insight into what works and what doesn't. The considerable rewards, they conclude, are well worth the challenges.

"Sales culture" is a phrase that is heard frequently these days in the financial services industry. Almost every bank says that it would like to create a sales team and a positive "sales culture" in order to improve profitability. But what exactly does this mean? How does an institution go about creating a sales culture? And what has been the experience of banks that have tried it?

How "sales culture" is defined and implemented varies from institution to institution. Bank Marketing magazine asked a roundtable of bankers representing various asset sizes and target markets to define their sales cultures as well as the obstacles and challenges they met along the way toward introducing them.

How would you define the sales culture at your bank?

Davis: I've only been here seven years, and I've watched it change to the point where you can now look at it and identify it. We're now on the road to being customer-driven rather than customer-reactive, and that colors everything. We reach out to the customers and put their requests ahead of our standard daily tasks.

Romero: Accountability is how we define our sales culture. Three-and-a-half years ago, I was with a bank out of St. Louis that merged with Nation's Bank. Up until that point there were two basic elements that were missing from everything we had tried with our sales force. First, we weren't holding salespeople accountable for sales production. It's hard to hold them accountable without the numbers required to keep score. Now, with today's technology, we stay on top of it. Second, we hadn't tied compensation as closely as necessary to sales production. Bank of America now believes strongly in doing both, a concept they call "meritocracy," or more bluntly, "Work hard and you'll get paid for it."

Way: The sales culture we're working toward is based in proactive processes. We're being more proactive because we realized that being reactive wasn't necessarily allowing a sales culture. Instead, we're behaving in a way that provides real service to the customer and it ultimately develops relationship banking.

Fisher: My answer refers specifically to what we call "community banking" at Comerica, which includes the branches throughout our primary market, Michigan. We describe our sales culture as activity-based. This can best be defined by explaining Comerica's program called "superstructure." It's a way of setting goals and measuring progress based on the value of what is sold, versus the traditional way that banks set goals on unit sales. The advantage is that each individual has a goal of creating value and can really sell any variety of products. It's a fairly product-neutral approach. Every product has its own level of profitability, and there's no incentive to sell the wrong product to a customer.

What goes into creating a positive soles culture?

Davis: We start by defining internal expectations. It's a very integrated model, considering that Federal Home Loan Bank didn't traditionally integrate. From a retail bank perspective, we're the closest match to a business-to-business bank. When we initially set up our models and staffing, we used a business-to-business banking model as our parallel.

Part of what goes into creating our positive sales culture is the bankwide awareness that all participants have a very clear understanding of their goals and expectations. We reinforce this with research by going back and asking our customers if we're meeting expectations. For example, right now I'm...