Bank Sales Corner

Small Business Strategy: Boosting Branch Manager Confidence

  

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Question: Many of our branch managers haven’t had a lot of experience making outside calls on small business owners and professionals. How would you help them get more confident doing that?

Answer: Confidence comes with practice. The first step is to get the branch managers in front of business owners on a regular basis. In our experience your goal should be 4 or 5 scheduled calls a week. (That is not a typo. If you were thinking that springing Mary Ann to make 1 call a week is going to be all that’s possible, forget about her ever getting comfortable or competent.)

Which businesses should the branch manager focus on? Start with existing customers for two reasons:

1. It’s easier to get in to see customers than to set up meetings with prospects.
2. One objective for the calls on existing customers can be to check their pulse to make sure everything’s going fine from a customer service standpoint and to thank them for their business. Branch managers are usually comfortable doing that.

Depending on the size of the business customer base in a given branch, you could be looking at an initial list of as many as 75 to 100 customers. If some of the business customers are borrowers, the branch manager should huddle with the commercial lender or business banker to get an update before setting up an appointment.  (In many cases, a joint call—or maybe no call—could result.) The list should also be reviewed with the branch manager’s Sales Manager.

Ask your branch managers to build a client folder for each major customer relationship. This could include MCIF household reports, information from the company’s website, industry data from sources like RMA or First Research, and any material on the owners/ principals you can find online (check LinkedIn or Zoominfo).

You probably need to consider some sales training that focuses on outside sales calls. When we work with branch managers we start by differentiating between a marketing call and a relationship development call.  The former is really about the bank and its product capabilities while the latter is designed to identify, understand and develop the customer’s needs.

In order to be successful developing needs, we coach branch managers on two different approaches: the first focuses on learning as much about the history, current objectives and future plans  of the business as possible—what we call a “business operations call.” Once you understand that—which, if accompanied by a tour, could take an hour or more—you’re ready for a “financial operations call” that explores how a business manages its working capital. (If you’d like more information about how we do this, email me at nmiller@mzbierlyconsulting.com and I’ll send you samples of the questions we use.)

If you’re the Sales Manager for a group of branches, you should do the following:

• Keep track of calling activity. Make sure that the branch managers are calling on their targeted lists—at least 2/3 of the calls should be on them.
• In your coaching sessions ask about what the branch managers learned on the calls. Can they talk intelligently about business operations? What did they discover about the business owner’s values? What are the next steps?

Don’t worry too much at first about the quality of the calls being made. To steal a sports analogy this is more about at bats than hits. Once your people have gotten some experience calling, you can begin to work on improving the quality of their efforts.

For ideas about coaching branch sales teams to generate more leads from outside calling, download an mp3 file with Buck Bierly’s comments by going to http://www.mzbierlyconsulting.com/small-business-strategy-coaching-branch-managers