If you find yourself with 10 minutes at some point in the day, here are 10 things you can do to improve your team’s chances of success.*
 
1.      Review the last 4 weeks of pipeline reports and weekly call planners for one of your average-performing team members. See what it tells you.
 
2.      Tell one of your team to schedule a day of calls with you in the next two weeks.  Be specific about the mix of customers and prospects you’d like to meet with.
 
3.      Call two of your bankers and ask them what you can do to help them with any deals in their pipelines.
 
4.      Think about how to improve the quality of your weekly sales meetings. If you’re stumped about how to improve them, ask one of your peers to sit in (or listen in) on your next meeting.  
 
5.      Arrange time to sit down one-on-one with all of your direct reports to review where they stand with their top customers and prospects. Make sure they share with you in advance their relationship plans for each customer/ prospect.
 
6.       Think about what additional training your team needs. If you’re not sure how to get it, call your Training Department or a banking trade association like RMA for help.
 
7.      Let your boss (or your boss’s boss) know which of your team members deserves special recognition. 
 
8.      Assess how well your sales people are using the tools you have provided them with (e.g. First Research, prospect information, call planning templates on your bank intranet, etc.) If you don’t like the answer, do something.
 
9.      Call up a prospect whose business one of your team members failed to land recently. Tell them you’d like to get some feedback on how your colleague could do better in the future. You may be surprised what you’ll learn.
 
10.Evaluate your own performance as a sales leader. If you’re interested in a checklist that you can use, go to http://mzbierlyconsulting.com/tips-managers.html.
 
* All of these assume that you have built a sales process that incorporates market management principles and guidance on building relationships with customers, prospects and COIs. If you haven’t, call me at 610-296-4772 or send me an email at nmiller@mzbierlyconsulting.com.  We can get you started.