Retail banking is all about consultative selling. It is particularly important when selling business products. Consultative selling is about relationships, partnering and building long-term associations with prospective and existing customers. The consultative sales professional is a problem-solver, providing expertise, advice and value-added service. To be good, they need to be able to do the following:
- Uncover prospective customer’s pain points
- Provide solutions to their problems, not simply describe benefits of a product or service.
- Communicate solutions in a way that the prospective customer understands.
With more than 100 banking products at a banker’s/sales rep’s disposal, the consultative sales process is manual, complex and not easily repeatable. This results in sales inefficiency and negatively impacts sales effectiveness. Efficiency is about streamlining your sales operations. Effectiveness is more strategic. It is about determining which products are strategic to sell and which are the most profitable to add to the bottom line.
Banks need to automate the consultative sales process by helping reps uncover customer’s needs, providing consistent recommendations by matching needs with solutions, and communicating those solutions in a verbal and written manner that is easily digestible by the prospect. Organizations that put an automated and repeatable sales processes in place reduce the complexity of the consultative sales process by removing the confusion of matching customer needs with the 100 or so products that are available in the sales reps “bag.” Automating key parts of this process would garner the following benefits:
- Sales will open 3x more accounts with each customer
- Consistently connect needs with solutions ensuring a consistent customer omnichannel experience
- Ensure that the customer data going into the CRM system is “clean”
- Help sales rep’s gain more confidence in their recommendations and focus on developing the relationship
- Accelerate sales onboarding for new hires
- Provide actionable insight to optimize sales performance
- Reduced sales and product training because the system is training reps as they use it
So, what are you waiting for? Click here for more information.
