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The Egyii team recently attended a financial services briefing in Singapore, hosted by Gartner, one of the global leaders in research and analysis.

The following is some of the advice offered to the Singapore and global banking community.

(Highlighted in Bold Italics are quotes from the analysts. The rest  are comments from Team Egyii)

Technology can help but it’s not the be all to end all. CRM systems, online support, Etc are important, but facing the client (face to face), is more important.

Banks going back to basics- focus on core business away from the peripherals. Too many complicated programmes were rolled out over the years. This caused too many problems and contributed to the  collapse. Keep it simple moving ahead.

Be more inclusive with clients as they have lost your trust. Remove yourself from siloed thinking and involve the customer in more decisions.

Best innovations come in time of bust- don’t stifle innovation. If you wait you will be left behind- you will never catch up. Be  bold- try new things, otherwise someone else will beat you to it.

Life goes on (during the crisis) so understand what your customers are doing.  Don’t put everything to a halt as business continues- keep client focused.

Internet usage and popularity in Singapore facts and stats: Facebook ranks 4^th, users spend avg 23.2 mins. DBS ranks 17^th, users spend avg. 4.1 mins. Times are changing.  How do you engage and listen to the voice of  your clients in these times?

Customers  say- “It’s my money, so listen to me.” Retailers get it & respond. Banks don’t. How do you respond to your clients needs?

Banks need to get more advice from peer groups. The web community is one way…face to face is another.

Know me (the client). Know my life. Retailers know it & get it. Banks don’t.” retailers engage well with clients why don’t financial organizations?

The client is pleading…”Please. I need a helping hand. Help.” They are calling for you- respond please.

How many helpful and meaningful  messages have been sent to customers during the crisis about what is really happening (and what to do about it)? 0- zero.” (from research of 25 major banks) Banks need to communicate better, not just from a broad sense but from a personal sense.

Customer experience is about building trust and understanding the entire customer experience process. Don’t segment it- look at the whole experience and the different ways of delivering it.

Customers want help. The financial organizations are not there- they are too internally focused. How do you focus on the client when he is crying for help?

Your customers have interests outside of banking and insurance. Look beyond the immediate financial services relationship. Look at building personal relationship where you can…

In conclusion, times are tough but you must forge on. Don’t sit back- take advantage of the situation as you will benefit long term. Keep it simple and focused on the client..

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Trust.

It remains a hot issue and will for a while.

With that, we at Egyii will be doing a series of interviews and Podcasts with the leaders in Trust, in anticipation of our August announcement on our new programme on Trust.

The second of the series is Charles H. Green, one of the founding fathers of the “trust movement ” and founder/CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates. He is the author of Trust Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. His expertise is in trusted relationships in business. For more on Charlie, click here.

Here is Part 2 (a continuation of Part 1).

The following is transcribed from a recorded session.

Trip Allen: Moving on to 2006, the theme of your second book called “Trust Based Selling,” encompasses two words: sales and trust.

These terms together have a bad reputation and don’t mix well with the business world, a little like oil and water.  Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Charlie Green:  Well, you are exactly right and I was completely conscious of that when I wrote it that way. In fact one major firm told me if you write a book with “sales” in the title we are not buying it.  The phenomena you just mentioned is that strong, and I wrote that way any way because I wanted to play off the tension.

I think the word sales or selling is a four letter word.  We all have these negative feelings about it, and the whole sales function in many ways has gotten a bad name, too.

What fascinated me about is that sales is where the person and the business come together. When a company buys from one and sells to another, with the exception of reverse online auctions, there are people doing “the deal,” and that is where institutions come together, where they connect. That is what fascinated me – how do people behave when there is serious money at stake and they are doing business? That is the essence of commercial relationship; commerce, in the old sense of the word.

I am happy with the choice I made, because I think it intrigues people. They say “how can you put those two together?” Well, you examine why they don’t fit, and it turns out to be a very interesting way of looking at it.

In a nutshell, there is nothing that sells better than being trusted – period. That’s the power of trust in the commercial relationship. I just find it fascinating.

Trip Allen:  Charlie, what’s the biggest thing you see wrong with selling today? You just mentioned that the reputation of a salesperson is bad, but what else do you see out there? What’s happening?

Charlie Green:  Well, it’s a great question because 10 to 15 years ago the biggest problem was salespeople selling and really not understanding the customer very well.  I think we have come to have a different problem and that is, let me call it the “mechanisation” of selling or the overdoing of “process reengineering” and the overuse of sales management systems.

Because of that we have broken the personal relationship and we have taken that “commercial” personal relationship (that I mentioned) and broken into a thousand mechanistic, metrics based, measurable behaviour based process. We have taken something that is, ought to be and can be very personal and have essentially depersonalised it. We have gotten to a level of detail where too often metrics have taken over from what the metrics were supposed to be measuring. People have therefore long ago “lost the forest for the trees” and have gotten deep in sequentially linked behaviours, so there is no relationship left.

I would actually say that is the biggest problem in selling today. We have lost the long term interpersonal relationship component of it. Every business I can think of out there still has an enormous amount of room for an increase in the level of relationships, and again, nothing is still better than that.

Trip Allen:  Great Charlie. One thing I am going to pull specifically from the book and one of the many activities I use – and I believe is very powerful,  is called “selling by doing and not telling.”

Traditionally salespeople told clients about the products, the features, the benefits etc. Salespeople have pretty much controlled the conversation. Can you elaborate a little bit on “selling by doing not telling?”

Charlie Green: Yes, and thank you for raising that. I agree with you, that is one of the powerful ideas in the book. If you think of it this way, with “selling by doing and not telling,” the more complicated the product, the more intangible the service, the longer relationship,  the more difficult  the whole sales process is, the less it is likely to be about snap decision and product qualities and so forth.

It’s complicated.

What you don’t want if you are buying a jet engine or if you are buying an audit or buying a brand advertising campaign, is to “out the expert the expert.”  That is an endless game that you will never win as a client or a customer.

What you really want to do is to be able to sleep at the night knowing you made the right decision about the person you deal with. And that is not going to come through PowerPoint presentations, Etc.; people are human beings and not persuaded of the trustworthiness of another human being by overused tools such as PowerPoint decks.  We’d like to think they are, and they will tell us they are, but they are not.

We are all human beings and profoundly make trust judgments based on much more of a “gut feel,” emotional feelings through connectivity and emotional feelings of safety. And that’s simply the way it is. I think we sort of rationalize it with all the logic and the data because, after all, we are supposed to be able to justify things.

That’s all true. But “selling by doing” basically says, instead of telling somebody about all the other past clients and all the wonderful things you have done, leave that behind and “just do it.” Deal with the person in front of you and deal with their issues, with their concerns and bring to them all the wonderful things and experiences you can deliver for them.

Just to simplify, I like to say it is like going out on a blind date with somebody. If they were to talk about the last seventeen people they went out with, you would be bored and offended.

But if on the other hand, what if your date is interesting, innovative and engaging and instead they ask you questions about you, we love that. We love it when people make the topic and conversation about us.

We need to take our expertise and apply it in real time to the problem at hand as it affects the person sitting in front of us. They don’t want to hear our resume or our history. They want to hear what our resume means for them.  That’s what “selling by doing and not telling” is all about.

Trip Allen: Great. Thank you for that. The next question has to do a bit with “selling by doing a not selling,” but it is all about collaboration. That is another key point you have in your book “Trust Based Selling.” How does collaboration improves trust and thereby improve the relationship?

Charlie Green: Well collaboration is one of the important elements I outlined in the book and it goes well beyond selling actually, although we will focus on the selling aspect only.

The other three key elements on the list are transparency, focus on the well being of the client (for sake of client and not just for us) and the tendency to look at the medium to long term (rather than just the short term).

Collaboration may be just the most important of the four elements. In any case, what collaboration means is a fundamental mindset. It says “I am not in this for me and dealing with you as an object. We are in this together. We are in for the sake of however long this relationship is going to be, working together for the greater outcome for both of us, but mainly for you, the client.”

So any decision we make has to be good one for both of us. We both have to be involved in it. We can’t keep too many secrets from each other. And if you begin thinking that way, you will begin behaving that way. You’ll start sharing more information with your customer, you’ll start feeling more free to ask them questions. After all, you have to know their answers in order to be collaborative, and frankly it even begins in the selling process. 

In those businesses that have process of using proposals, my “radical” suggestion is to write the next proposal, sitting next to the client in their offices. Instead of saying “great discussion” or “I’ll get back to you with the proposal later this week,” say “let’s book the conference room again and let’s work on this together. I know it is a proposal and, we may not get the job, I understand that. But if we may do this, you will have, at the end of the day, the best proposal possible from the combination of the two of us. By the way I suggest doing that with other potential vendors also. You will learn so much more about working with people if you begin working with them.’

That is an example of the power of collaboration.

End of Part 2. To be continued…

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

According to a recent study published by Dow Jones titled “Wealth Management After the Crunch,” the following numbers on banks’ performance were presented: 74% of the banks in Asia thought they over-performed through the crisis whereas 91% of the US banks were under the illusion that they performed well.

But, the reality is just 29% of the clients concurred with this.

The author, Bruce Weatherill, a former PWC consultant and now representing his own firm Bruce Weatherill Executive Consulting, states: “Clients are saying they look for service from life to death to the next generation. Wealth managers are delivering that by changing advisers very frequently moving in and out of markets. They don’t understand to be successful, wealth managers need to provide security, a long term vision and not just transactions.”

As for trust, Mr. Weatherill states that 65% of the wealth managers in Asian banks think their clients see them as “trusted advisors.” 

But, again the clients have a different perspective on this. Only 32% agree with this.

Mr. Weatherill states in the report that “Wealth managers underestimate the loss of trust that has resulted from the credit crunch. They need to recognise the damage and work rapidly to repair it.

There are other statistics around low numbers of loyalty between clients and the wealth managers, disagreements on the clients’ view of performance Vs the banks, Etc.

All of this leads to dissatisfied clients and all in all it is not positive (to say the least).

So much so that many of the clients are switching to other institutions and private wealth management firms.

We all don’t need to have these numbers to recognise that there are levels of denial and a lack of real client focus.

When will the banks and other financial institutions realise that it is time for a change?

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Trust is about being, not doing. In fact, in Laurel Delaney’s blog How to Build Trust, Marilynn T. Mobley says “It isn’t something you do – it’s what you are.”

Our clients don’t leave meetings with us and analyse our actions and come to the conclusion that ‘because he kept to his word he can be trusted.’ Keeping to your word is, of course, essential. But this kind of behaviour is just the entry ticket to play the game of business.

Trust is sensed. It’s about how our client feels when in our presence. These feelings derive from all the unconscious signals we send out as we interact with our client.

We can’t strategise this by deciding what behaviours we are going to engage in to create trust. We can’t fake it. It comes from our intent.

If our intent is to do the  best we can for our client irrespective of sales targets and other pressures – just listen and give them what they need – then we will unconsciously communicate authenticity.

So the starting point is to look inside ourselves honestly and ask whether our goals are the right ones for long term business development and ultimate success.

All of us need to audit our own purpose and aspirations from time to time. Take the time for some introspection instead of always looking at the outside world for answers.

When we are familiar with our internal world and are authentic, then the outside world pretty much takes care of itself. This, I believe, is the key to building trusting relationships that lead to increased business success.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

For our updated overview, please see:

Egyii Overview May 2009 

Thank you.

Trip & James, Team Egyii, Singapore

HR-in-Action Nite- 2 April 2009
for the HR Community @ SHRI Singapore Human Resources Institute

The secret to getting good results at work is by getting control of our thinking, rather than just diving into new behaviours.

Most learning programmes try to help us change our behaviours by giving us new knowledge and skills. However, much of the time nothing actually happens because we have not addressed the things that drive those behaviours i.e. our thinking patterns. It’s like a plane trying to change course while all the time having the auto pilot set on another direction.

Yes, it’s important to learn new behaviours. But since so many of them are habitual, we need to change the beliefs, values and emotions that control those behaviours if we are to experience change that lasts more than a few days. And the funny thing is, when we do control our thinking patterns, the behaviours tend to take care of themselves.

Based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), this talk will introduce you to some of the key drivers of our behaviour as well as methods for getting control of these. You will find that you can apply this knowledge in any situation both at work and at home, and you will gain a new sense of control over the results you get.

Please feel free to click on the downloadable Slideshare version of the presentation here.

For more information, please email us at stuff@egyii.com.

Bon vivant!

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

What happened to the old days when you walked around the corner to the local bank with your wad of cash or your cheque…walked in and were greeted by Norm the security guard….then greeted by Esther the receptionist …and then John the banker, who is your neighbor and child’s Godfather?

You sat around, chatted, had a cup of coffee and a curry puff..and actualy enjoyed being in the presence of people you liked and trusted.

In 1969 Chemical Bank in NY stated in its ad campaign: “On Sept. 2, our bank will open at 9:00 and never close again!”

That changed the world of banking.

This was the start of the faceless ATM we see everywhere today. It was the start of automation, which has led to technologies such as online internet banking and more.

Wow! Great concepts! 24 hour banking!…clients loved it..and what a great way to save money for the bank. Remove faces, remove overhead. But this does not work for everyone.

Some interesting statistics from Gallup on banking  preferences show that a high percentage of people still bank at a branch. They want to see faces.

Clearly, the banks need to re-look at how they interface with their clients on a day to day basis. It should be for the  ”convenience of the customer” not the “convenience of the bank.”

Isn’t it time for a change…back to the good ‘ol days?

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

First there was “Speed Dating.”

Then there was ‘Speed Networking”

And now there is “Spud Networking.”

How many times have you gone to a “networking” event where you have been assailed by salesmen from moving companies, hotels selling packages, priority and private bankers or spud companies?  All are looking for prospects…

The Scenario

There are 30 people in the room and these salesmen are canvassing everyone, tipping their card to any and all innocent passersby. And then he comes to you…he flashes his card, presents it in a stately fashion, and moves to the next person. Don’t you feel special? or do you feel like one of the many spuds (potatoes) growing in a great, big field?

Often that card lands in the bin when you get home. No meaning. No attachment. (No insults meant)

The Real Networker

Off to the side is a gentleman. He is poised and confident. He is also a “salesman” but of a different sort. He is spending time with only 1 or 2 people, listening, asking questions, showing interest and concern. Although his ‘prospects” may not be immediate prospects, he could potentially link down the road or through “word of mouth.”

His card ends up in the Rolodex.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Being There.

1/2 of building relationships is just being there.

1/4 is exhibiting the personal traits; being genuine, showing your clients you care, listening, presenting yourself with undue confidence and ensuring that you are like-able.

But you need to “be there” first, before you can exhibit the other traits.

Why is it so important? How many people really interface with the client in good or bad times? Very few.

With all the phoniness today it is tough to find a  great diamond. But if you realise the rewards of just being there , then you will reap the benefits, you will stand out.

So be there.

(PS…the other 1/4 is adding direct client value)

For related blogs, see How to Re-Polish the Banking Image.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

There is a lot of talk today in:

Government (Obama has been promising it in recent speeches and I have just counted 33 times that The White House Blog has written on it in different postings in 3 days!)

Business (”…transparency in Pharma’s relationships with physicians is here to stay…” from MSNBC)

Banking (Geitner “..the necessary response is to try to bring more confidence, more transparency to the strength of the system…” from NPR)

…about transparency. But what is transparency?

Merriam Webster’s dictionary describes it as:

2 a: free from pretense or deceit : frank b: easily detected or seen through : obvious c: readily understood d: characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices.

Transparency is clearly one of the most talked about solutions as a way out of our current crisis, as highlighted in Trusted Matters.

Transparency in Banking

How does all of this relate specifically to banking and resolving the banks woes and challenges?

After the Great Depression and the initial “big financial collapse,” the government bodies worldwide have required high levels of requirements around transparency in the banking system- to a point where both the governments, the bank employees and the general public are confused.

There is probably too much information – which makes it absurdly difficult to digest and understand.

Problem: If the governments and the bank employees are confused, aren’t the clients confused? How does this translate into concerns around relationship management with clients?

Most banking clients have lost trust and are trying to re-build the relationships with their clients. Re-building trust is not going to be easy, but by focusing on your Relationship Managers’behavioural skills it can be done. On top of that, instilling a level of personal transparency (maybe we call it “truth”?) will always be a big bonus.

Simply put, all clients (as they sift through the paperwork and legalise) want to know is “How safe is my money?” Can anyone answer that?

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore