Financial Services Six Sigma

Robust organizations constantly strive to get more out of their sales force or sales network.   Improving sales processes/performance is a common area of focus for Six Sigma.  The goal of a recent project in a lending organization was to determine the root cause of why sales volume was staying flat.  Unlike most Six Sigma projects that require rigorous data collection, analysis, reanalysis and more data collection, we stumbled on the root cause of this problem while in step 1 of the methodology – collecting the voice of customers (VOC).  We selected a group of customers to visit – in this case “secondary” customers, i.e., brokers.  While these customers are regarded as loyal to the company (continue to do business with the lender), they had not increased their relationship (sales volume) with the lender during the previous 2 years.

Prior to the customer visit, a cross functional team developed a list of questions to drive at the root cause of the flat performance.  A date was set for the interview, and a team of people from the lending firm visited the brokers.  The first question posed to all brokers was “what do you like most about working with our firm?”  And regardless of the customer (broker) visited the answer surprisingly was the same: “I like being recognized as one of your top 20 brokers.  I particularly like the incentives that come along with being a top producer for you.”  The natural next question was “then why have you not increased your business with us?” The very simple response was (abbreviated of course): “because you have not changed your targets and regardless of whether I give you $1MM or $3MM you pay me the same amount.”  Well, there we had it – the market size was increasing, the brokers were doing more business, but because our targets for the brokers had stayed static for the past 18 months the incentives had also stayed static.  What the customer was telling us quite plainly was that they were only working as hard as they needed to attain the targets/goals that had been defined for them.

The assumption that a target will function as a constant in the marketplace is erroneous but this epiphany will not visit you unless you ask, probe and talk to your customer. We always harp on data driven decisions and metrics as a means to control/monitor…but through this simple exercise we were reminded that these metrics have to stay relevant in order to drive the desired behavior.

S. Shaffie ProcessArc, Inc. - Financial Services Six Sigma