Customers are increasingly educated and competent. To expand banking relationships, the sales function must be able to react, adjust and satisfy customer demands on the spot. Understanding customer needs and credibility in offering a solution are prerequisites for even being in the running. New customer demands mean banking products and services conversations have become far more complex, demanding a wider range of product knowledge, sales techniques, customer insights and company-wide awareness. And the customer expects a fast response. This is the key challenge facing today's sales function: how to balance the need for faster customer response while gaining the right information to qualify the customer risk profile and close the sale.
Barriers to better sales and relationship management include:
- Organizations don't set revenue targets and allocate effort based on maximizing overall contributions.
- There's no two-way clearinghouses for the right information at the right time.
- You don't measure the underlying drivers of sales effectiveness.
The five decision areas described below can improve the speed of sales execution and enable a more effective use of time. They rely on the two-way flow of vital information between customers and the bank. This sharing of information can accelerate the speed of adjustments and realignments of product, market, message, service and other elements of the business. Download the Performance Manager for Banking book and find out how IBM Cognos software can help with Sales and Relationship Management in areas such as:
- Revenue results: What is driving revenue performance?
- Customer/product profitability: What is driving contribution performance?
- Sales tactics: What is driving sales effectiveness?
- Sales pipeline: What is driving the revenue pipeline?
- Sales plan variance: What is driving the revenue plan?
