This Midwest community bank saw their business continuing to deteriorate. The number of new accounts had plateaued, and referrals to other departments (such as wealth management) had declined from prior years. Upper management wanted all employees to become more comfortable and skilled at needs based selling.
Sales Training Needs Assessment
Given the current economic climate and high unemployment levels, the bank’s sales and business development challenges were daunting. Rather than watch their business continue to deteriorate, upper management said that they wanted to upgrade the skills of all their employees to sell and service clients. In addition, they shared that the bank had tried to implement a sales training program a few years ago, but that the other workshop was negatively received because it taught a pushy, hard-sell approach to selling. Management wanted to ensure that a needs based sales process be taught to their employees.
Sales Training Solution
Because Peak Selling’s Needs Based Selling program is based on a consultative approach to selling, we were confident that the content would meet their needs. However, due to the prior bad experience in using an outside instructor who endorsed a hard-sell approach, we decided to partner with a local consultant who was known to upper management and who was respected throughout the entire bank. To save money, they licensed Peak Selling’s sales training materials and used a local outside instructor to teach a series of sales workshops to over 100 employees. Net results: their referral rate increased by over 50%, and they also saw an increase of 20% in the opening of new core deposit accounts.