A fairy tale of successful sales

Isn’t it that the most successful sales rep is the one who „brings home“ the most business? Much is always better than a little. Better a bad deal than no deal at all.

Bad deal = “the market is so difficult” vs. no deal at all = “he can’t do it.”

But why is it like that? Even with the hunter, nobody asks how much ammunition he has used, you just look at what game he brings home with him. Obviously, the assessment is not about efficiency, but about effectiveness. There is no applause for economical use of ammunition and no applause for sparing game for certain reasons. The hunter is judged as a hunter (= implementation), not as a manager (= decision maker).

The result, however, is a vacuum cleaner effect – everything that looks halfway like prey is taken along.

To prevent this, many banks and savings banks have considered criteria and hurdles that the business and the customer must meet in order to be acceptable. However, this does not sharpen the search focus for business (i.e. the hunting scheme), it just makes it more complex.

The real questions that need to be answered are:

• How do I reward an improvement in the banks’ credit and / or customer portfolio?
• How do I reward the active management of customers who do not / no longer fit?
• How do I reward good business in relation to any business?

This can only succeed if the bank or savings bank is ready to say goodbye to volume growth and think about how it defines quality and how this quality can be measured.

This quality parameter(s) is / are then the subject of steering for the front office. Here, of course, you have to make sure that there are not only relative values but also absolute values – if necessary, part of the classic quantitative control must be retained in order to avoid overloading. In return, the weighting of the steering parameters can be varied quite well until they fit in order to achieve the desired effect.