With more productive and effective processes and tools in place, along with an improved pipeline, the sales team had more visibility, clarity and transparency as to the status of each sales opportunity than ever before.
By building on this via an issue-based account planning framework, the EY team supported the sales team to work to a solution-based selling approach. This encouraged them to devise a catalog of value propositions and solutions, which supported them to quickly react and dynamically adjust as opportunities arose.
In turn, this generated a significant cultural shift across the firm – with the changed tone and energy of the sales team positively impacting the entire organization.
Lessons for banks
Similarly, to the challenges encountered by the EY FinTech client, a CCSB bank’s sales force can often be product-centric and siloed, and lack the right technologies to create coherent, sophisticated sales processes that will work for its people.
There is little point in automating inefficient processes and allowing inefficiencies to flourish and siloes to remain.
To help their sales teams operate more effectively, these banks must develop more dynamic capabilities for sales pipeline management, rethink how their solutions can address changing customer expectations, and refine their sales models to grapple with “the new normal” of constantly changing customer needs. By combining data-driven insights, analytics and research to develop tailored solutions designed to meet unique client needs, this banking segment can accelerate growth and drive transformation across their organizations.
Increased sales force effectiveness can also serve as a prompt for CCSB banks to adopt a more customer-centric approach – something that is becoming more relevant each day, particularly as banks emerge from the economic fallout of COVID-19.
With the right sales processes and approach in place, banks that are eagerly searching for new sources of growth and opportunity will have much better visibility at a time in which decisions are increasingly being made in precarious market conditions. To come through the final round of the current crisis intact, banks will need their sales force to shape their growth agenda, to rebuild and seize the opportunities of tomorrow.