Hiring bankers who can sell: the best marketing program in the world will fail unless your frontline personnel can sell--really sell. And the way to get people to do that is to match their personalities to the requirements of the sales job.

• Author: Schneider, James E.
• Position: Feature

Hiring bankers who can sell is as much of a marketing concern as it is a human resources issue. When bankers can't sell, bank products don't sell, and marketing fails to meet its goals.

Today, the three most promising profit opportunities for bank marketers include:

* Using CRM data for proactive target selling to existing clients.

* Managing high-value client portfolios to maximize profitability and client loyalty.

* Sustaining an aggressive new business-calling program on target prospects, inquiries and referral sources.

Despite all the dollars invested in technology and sales process to support these sales activities, average sales-productivity-per-banker remains low compared to almost any reason able standard of performance.

This is bad news for bankers since, in today's economic environment, they typically have to generate more revenue with fewer sales personnel. Many bank marketers aerially avoid introducing proactive sales tactics--such as segmentation selling, client portfolio management or outbound teleconsulting that could substantially increase their revenue--because they believe they don't have the right personnel to make them work. When bankers at the point of sale don't have the competency or motivation to sell, investment in even the best CRM technology or sales training is likely to yield a poor return.

The high cost of poor hiring

At the same time that CRM technology is increasing profit opportunity for banks, poor selling is cutting opportunities. In a three-year nationwide study of sales personnel in 50 financial services organizations with established sales cultures, we found that top sales performers outsell average performers by two-to-one and outsell low performers by 10-to-one. These ratios hold up across job roles as diverse as mortgage originator, personal hanker, commercial lender, investment representative and teller.

Not only is average sales-productivity-per-banker low, but also the failure rate for sales positions is over 50 percent. This is the percentage you come up with when both below-standard sales production and turnover are considered. The cost of these hiring failures is enormous since the cost of employee turnover is estimated to be 1.5 to 2.5 times the annual salary of a replaced employee.

Our findings suggest that many bank sales personnel, even top performers, are not achieving optimum performance simply because the job role they were hired for or promoted to isn't the best fit for their strengths. This is particularly true of sales leadership roles. The outcome of promoting a top sales producer to sales manager is frequently the loss of an outstanding salesperson, the addition of a mediocre supervisor, and the reduction of sales force morale. Poor job matching creates another market risk factor since employee satisfaction is the primary driver of client satisfaction.

Why banks aren't hiring right

In the simplest terms, "Banks are looking for sales in all the wrong places." We found little correlation between age, gender, education or experience with superior performance in roles, yet these factors are weighted heavily in most bank...