Vaulting into a Sales Culture.

• Author: Bernstel, Janet Bigham
• Position: Advice on converting bankers to slaespeople, effective sales mangement - Brief Article

How to convert bankers from order-takers to salespeople: A look at effective sales management and what needs to be done to create a dynamic sales team.

It's the dream of every bank executive: to grow retail market share. But this is a dream that's slow to translate into reality. To grow means to sell, and to sell means you have to have an effective sales culture in place. The pressure is on both the frontline representatives and the people who manage them to increase profits at the point of customer contact.

With banks spreading into so many diverse areas, bank employees are now faced with pitching a multitude of new product lines. In turn, managers are responsible for making sure employees get sales training as well as tracking and measuring staff performance. Often, the managers themselves are struggling to understand this new environment.

Two of the key problems that managers face are how to manage sales effectively and how to promote team selling. Here's a look at these challenges.

How to be a good sales manager

"Unfortunately, many times branch managers get promoted because they're good individual performers," explains Wayne Outlaw, founder of Outlaw Group, a sales staffing consulting agency and author of "Smart Staffing." "They go into management without the right level of training and development, and don't understand how to go from getting a client to make a decision on their recommendations to getting a financial service professional to do the things they may not want to do."

Transitioning from seller to manager isn't always easy, but can be facilitated by firmly establishing a level of expectations.

"The easiest thing a brand new branch manager can do is to get in there and try to sell people more loans," explains Outlaw. "But the manager really needs to sit down with the individual employee and negotiate a set of standards that allows both of you to measure the person's performance."

Jill Honeycomb agrees. She is area manager in north Connecticut for Quick & Reilly, a FleetBoston Financial company. She currently supervises 18 senior financial consultants who serve customers of FleetBoston's retail bank branches. Honeycomb claims that her expectations for production and performance are clearly communicated.

"There's no question as to what my expectations are," she emphasizes, "and the expectations of everyone are the same."

Expectations are laid out each year through planning sessions. Individual annual meetings consist of a...