Creating a Sales Culture

The Accelerate Performance team really took the time to learn about our team and what we were trying to accomplish. In addition they also truly understand the business that we operate in. This allowed us to develop a system that helped us win, faster. A key differentiator with Accelerate Performance is their commitment to the implementation and ongoing support and maintenance of the program we put in place. They impact the growth of our business and of our people. Great partners!

Daniel Yifru

Director, Head of Internal Sales - Defined Contribution BlackRock

Situation

BlackRock is the largest asset manager on earth. Leadership in their retirement business approached Accelerate Performance in an effort to change the sales/service culture and approach with their internal sales desk. Team members were hired with the expectation to be part of a “sales” desk, with aspirations to be proactive sellers. They were too often bogged down by internal and operational requests and needing to be reactive, and it was a challenge to be productive in the time they had to grow their business.

Approach

After meeting with team members and leaders and observing them in action, BlackRock leadership and AP identified together a potential opportunity to approach their customers differently, in a more thoughtful and intentional way. Rather than focusing primarily on “cold calls” to spontaneously catch their financial advisor clients with time to speak, they took a deliberate approach to arrange short meetings with clients that would actually be scheduled on the calendar.

We developed a process to engage advisors to set up these short “phone” meetings, prepare for them, execute them to uncover and qualify opportunities, and establish meaningful follow up. After an initial training program on their new process,, we coached and practiced these meetings over the subsequent months. We also worked with leadership to instill a practice culture, to continue to drive improvement on this meeting process and fundamental skills.

This impacted, both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the team:

Team members now created more meaningful sales opportunities every day, and spent considerably less time, calling to spontaneously catch a client with a cold call.
Because we created a practice culture focused on the short meeting conversation, team members executed with a much higher degree of confidence and competence.

Outcomes

In the first year after this initiative was introduced:

Sales results from the team more than tripled
Sales per advisor client have increased by 176%
The culture has evolved; there is greater energy and the team feels more excited about their job because of the focus on sales and growth.
The team has received several promotions and recognition for their sales efforts.
New team members are becoming productive faster, now that there’s a training and skill building system