A Guide to Successful Selling and Cross-Selling Techniques

Introduction

In the face of ever-increasing competition in the financial services industry, it is your employees who will set you apart. Well-trained and sales-oriented employees are essential to establishing and maintaining complete financial relationships. It is their abilities that will attract good, long-term customers to your financial institution, and their ability to retain these customers increases your profitability.

What Is Cross-Selling, and Why Is It So Important?

Cross-selling is simply selling additional banking services to existing customers. Cross-selling is really cross-helping. It gives your customer-contact employees the satisfaction of recognizing customers' needs and meeting those needs with a useful product or service.

Research statistics demonstrate that the average customer uses less than two services from any one depository institution. That same customer may use anywhere from two to six different financial institutions in the same community. Seventy percent of all customers share their banking needs with more than one financial institution.

These customers may not be using more of your financial institution's products and services simply because no one has asked them. The odds of keeping a customer with your financial institution increase in direct proportion to the number of your services that they use.

What Techniques Are Involved in Cross-Selling

To customers, your employees are your financial institution. Customer contact employees must have an attitude that selling is a legitimate banking function. Help them develop this attitude by training them that their needs-based sales efforts help customers find the products that meet their banking needs.

Customers benefit needs-based from cross-selling efforts because they receive the financial services they need and want. Suggestions and recommendations from their banker expose them to products and services that otherwise they might not have known about. Successful cross-selling is the result of recognizing a customer need and meeting that need with a useful product or service.

Cross-selling helps your financial institution realize its objectives: providing useful financial services, retaining customers, attracting new customers, and staying competitive with other financial institutions.

The characteristics your customer-contact employees need to include friendliness, an ability to listen, genuine interest in your institution's products, and pride and enthusiasm about their role.

Seven Steps to Successful Cross-Selling

These steps demonstrate the communication process between your employees and your customers:

Step 1: Greet.

Customers should be put at ease, and employees should establish rapport as quickly as possible. As a customer approaches, employees seated at a desk should stand, shake hands, and introduce themselves.

Step 2: Listen.

Listening may be the single most valuable skill your customer-contact employees can develop in learning to cross-sell. A great deal of selling will take place when the customer is doing the talking. It's what the customer says that determines the outcome of a sales conversation: When customers have the opportunity to speak freely, they often sell themselves.

Effective listening includes two activities: paying attention to the customer's needs, and mentally matching those needs to specific services.

Step 3: Ask Questions.

Productive questions lead to further discussion, not a simple "yes" or "no" answer. Every customer should be asked, "Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

Step 4: Use Product Knowledge.

Customer-contact employees should match a customer's need with the appropriate product. Product knowledge is the foundation of selling. Train your employees so that they know your financial institution's products and services as well as the benefits of all of them.

Employees should try to view each service from the customer's perspective and help customers envision the value and benefits they'll receive from that service.

Step 5: Answer Questions and Objections.

Objections often mean the customer is seeking more information in order to understand how the product will meet his or her needs. Objections should be thought of as opportunities to go into more detail about the recommended product.

Step 6: Test for Agreement.

Customer-contact employees should test for agreement throughout a conversation to be sure the customer understands how a particular service meets his or her needs. Employees should not move from one point to the next until the customer understands and agrees.

Step 7: Take Action to Sell the Product.

Unless employees ask for the order, their cross-selling efforts could be wasted. When the customer agrees that a specific service will meet his or her needs, customer-contact employees should close the sale immediately by filling out the appropriate forms necessary to initiate the service.

Help employees realize that not every customer-contact situation will result in a sale or sales referral. However, your employees and your financial institution will benefit from the increased sales opportunities, and your customers will benefit from the professional financial advice that has been provided.