Last week was a whirlwind of information for everyone who attended Dreamforce in San Francisco. There was an abundance of sessions and keynotes related to the industry where we’re seeing advancements in technology and business processes.
The banking industry continues to be a growing competitive landscape that’s seeing constant disruption by new financial technology entrants. Customer and member demands are rapidly growing as well as regulatory changes that never seem to end. Last week, I was excited to hold two roundtable discussions with executives from banks and credit unions where we discussed the ever-changing landscape, growth, service, and the drive to transform the customer/member experience. Coming home with all of this amazing information, I wanted to leave you with five actionable highlights for Banks and Credit Unions.
5. Buy Technology the Right Way.
Buying technology can be daunting, ensuring you have an action plan in place that streamlines the process makes key decisions easy to manage. As the demands of customers and members grow, you have to be agile, while ensuring compliance, employee training, and adoption, and stakeholder buy-in are all met with success. For further tips, check out this recent article about buying bank technology.
4. People, Process and Technology.
Buying the technology is great, but without a process driving, it is ineffective. If you find you lack process, defining that should be your first order of business. In order to define your process, you need to understand your sales cycle and not just the department or division but for the organization as a whole. Is your sales cycle top-down or organic? Is technology part of your sales process or is it driven by the individual? You define the success of your employees by having an agreed-upon process within each department and for each employee to avoid doubt and create structured accountability. Find a way to meet other departments where you cross paths. Create a sales process language that everyone understands for both unity within the organization and an expectation of where each individual fits into the process.
3. Where Accountability and Expectation Meet.
If it’s not in Salesforce, does it exist? Adoption is successful when it’s defined by the expectations set in your sales process. Create clear guidelines on how sales are monitored and tracked from the top down. Ensure initial and ongoing training is in place for technology and create a system for fielding questions so the process is never left behind while maintaining future adoption. By having an understanding of how user’s metrics are reported, employees can easily understand their place in the sales process and how their contribution affects the bottom line for the organization.
2. Recognition Leads to Employee Empowerment.
How do you make your whole team as successful as your shining star? Creating reports and dashboards based on your top performers can give you insight into their success driven by activities, tasks, opportunities, and leads. Once you’ve defined what is most important to your team’s performance, you can compare, prepare, and create customized training goals to advance and grow your entire team. Transparency into your team’s behaviors and workflow means everyone can learn from each other to be better and sell more effectively. Once you’ve mastered your reporting process you can begin to see predictable results that can have a major impact on your organization: by understanding what you’ve done, you can see where you’re going.
1. Cultural Changes are Tough.
Technology integration in your sales process is a significant cultural change. It also gives you an opportunity to create transparent insight into your business process and customer behavior across divisions. A customer’s relationship is owned throughout the organization rather than a single department. In today’s atmosphere, it is imperative to eliminate silos and work together as an organization to create strong relationships with your customers and prospects. Shifting from being a product-driven company to a relationship-driven one requires an understanding of how each division fits into the customer/member’s experience to create depth in their relationships and introduces new ways to collaborate organization-wide.
These takeaways are a great topic for discussion, leave a comment below or contact us today to further discuss how you can transform your bank with Salesforce. Silverline offers accelerated solutions for banks and credit unions. See how our solutions can give you a competitive advantage and an agile way of adapting to future demands of the industry with Banker360 and CreditUnion360.
