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Cross Sell? Cross Service!
| Guest post by: Grant Cardone |
Article Overview: Strategies for deepening relationships with your existing customers and members.
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Free Download - Auto Sales Recover Due to Superior Value By Grant Cardone |
Cross Sell? Cross Service!
Banks and credit unions spend a great deal of time fretting over
how to sell new products and services to their existing client base. But
few make the transition necessary to do so. More than any other time in
history, it is now essential for every financial institution to go
deeper into existing customer and member accounts, in order to
successfully sell additional services that are of equal benefit to both
the consumers and the financial institution.
Huge
amounts of time, energy and money have been dedicated to customer
relationship management (CRM) tools, referral tracking, profitability
analytics, activity management systems, information support systems and
direct mail campaigns. Despite all of this fancy technology, many banks
and credit unions have failed to cross-sell in a consistent manner.
Is
this because traditional sales approaches no longer suffice? Is it due
to the fact that the individuals discussing products and services are
not properly motivated?
Opportunities missed
From
personal experience, I can tell you that most financial institutions do
not attempt the cross-sale in a way that ensures the best chance of
positive results. For example, I have relationships with at least ten
national and regional banks to support my businesses in Orlando,
Houston, San Diego, Tucson and Los Angeles.
Each
of these banks has access to my personal and business deposits, but not a
single one of these institutions has ever attempted to cross-sell me on
any of their other products and services. Hard to believe, isn’t it?
Don’t be surprised if your employees, even your managers and executives,
are not fully capitalizing on these opportunities to increase your
profits — and most importantly, to improve customer satisfaction and
loyalty.
What is the best way to address this
endemic shortcoming in the sales process? The first step is to
reorganize how your staff thinks about selling. Specifically, each
interaction must be motivated by a greater focus on enhancing service,
and less of a focus on accomplishing a sale.
As
stated elsewhere in this publication, most banking professionals cringe
at using “sales” to describe, well, their selling processes. To address
this distaste for the term, financial institutions call their sales
representatives tellers, clerks, bankers, specialists, advisors, vice
presidents — everything but the salespeople they are. Culture at large
doesn’t hold selling in much higher regard.
It is
my belief that many banks and credit unions fall short or their
cross-selling potential for a simple reason: they’re focusing on selling
mechanics when they should be paying attention to how other products
and services you offer might benefit the customer or member, based on
what they’re telling you.
Because the sales
process comes with so many negative associations, every action taken
risks being interpreted in a way other than what was intended. The best
way to remove such chances for misinterpretation rests in changing our
attitudes toward every cross-selling opportunity that arises. You must
see it as a chance to help the customer even more, not merely sell more
stuff.
Steps
to better cross-selling
In my book Sell
to Survive, I spent a majority of the pages citing example after
example of why selling is critical to the survival of all individuals
and all businesses. “Selling is not a job for some, but as vital to your
survival as food, water or oxygen,” I write.
This
was not a ‘how to sell’ book, but rather a ‘why to sell’ book.
If
you don’t get the intentions of your people straightened out, all
programs, initiatives and investments to sell more products and services
will fall short of your expectations.
Follow
these steps to promote more effective cross-selling at your bank or
credit union:
1. Survey what selling means
to your organization. Does your culture treat sales purely as a
self-centered pursuit, or one that also will benefit your customers and
members equally?
2. Shift your thinking
from selling to service. Don’t ask, “What can I possibly sell
this person?” Rather, ask “How can what we offer benefit this person
even more?”
3. Sell your staff on the
merits of your products and services. Before they can
authentically communicate the benefits of your products and services,
your salespeople must clearly understand — and believe in — those
benefits themselves.
4. Adopt metrics to
validate the effectiveness of service-based selling. The
numbers don’t lie, so you should implement processes and programs to
measure the positive results of your cultural selling change. These
positive metrics have a snowball effect that encourages other
salespeople to change their approach accordingly.
By
embracing this service-based approach to cross-selling at your bank or
credit union, you’ll likely find more of your staff willing to do what
it takes to spur sales – and bottom-line growth.
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Article Tags: Customer relations, Finance, Service
|
About the Author: Grant Cardone RSS for Grant's articles - Visit Grant's website His most recent project is a virtual training site that is revolutionizing how organizations train, called www.salestrainingvt.com Grant currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Elena Lyons and their daughter Sabrina. Click here to visit Grant's website   Extending Unemployment Benefits Wont Prepare People for Jobs Increase Your Sales in This New Year Writing a Best Selling Book Top 6 Steps to Buying a Car Competition Is Not Healthy |
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re: Cross Linking, how do you define that? I thought linking to other pages on your website (that are related) was a good thing...maybe that's not what you meant.[/quote:8b8rg2nw]
So my friend,Cross Linking is simply means the process of linking between two sites,Whether or not they are owned by the same person, cross linking is the process on which the Internet is built.It allows users to reference sites with content similar to that which they are already viewing, and may be of further interest to them.[/quote:8b8rg2nw]
Thanks for clarifying!
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Choosing a title that has no relation to the content on the page
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Cross Linking[/quote:1y3g8bot]
re: Cross Linking, how do you define that? I thought linking to other pages on your website (that are related) was a good thing...maybe that's not what you meant.
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