Are Sales Campaigns Making You Pushy?

Internal Sales Campaigns are often a useful tool to provide focus for staff, track results, and manage progress toward strategic goals. However, when financial institutions create sales campaigns around a specific product or service, it is important that the sales staff don’t become so eager to meet a sales campaign goal that they sacrifice fulfilling customer/member needs.

For instance, if a prospect walks into your branch during a sales campaign, would your front line staff immediately discuss the campaign product with them, or would they talk to the prospect about their needs and make the best recommendation for their life? Talking about the campaign might have an immediate positive impact on your campaign results, but will likely cause a higher risk of attrition if the prospects needs aren’t being met. Clearly, if your sales staff has a discussion to create a customized solution for their prospect, the prospect will have a more positive experience and be more likely to remain a customer/member overtime.

Therefore, it’s important to keep sales delivery a priority during your sales campaign, here’s how...

• Training – Provide sales training focused around customer life stages. When you roll out a campaign, clearly communicate that the sales delivery must be maintained.
• Set Appropriate Goals – Ensure that your goals are not counter-productive to customer needs. Keeping goals specific to new households, cross-sell ratios, or general product lines will provide your staff the flexibility of choosing products that are the right fit for customers/members and also counting towards a campaign.
• Prequalify – Continue to have conversations during a campaign around your product, but make sure to prequalify customers. You can prequalify customers through an MCIF system, core system, or simply through a discussion.

Campaigns come in all shapes and sizes, but when you’re determining your campaign specifics, make sure that campaign goals will not be met at the expense of customer/member needs. Doing what is right for the customer will help to strengthen your relationship and increase retention.

Best,

Jamie