Change is hard: how Ryan Cannady increased membership 5X,

Convincing a customer to change from a competitor to your product or service is a challenge faced by almost every company at one point or another. Convincing a customer to make you their primary vendor and scrap a mix and match formula to solve their problem is another. Ryan Cannady, the Chief Retail Officer of Deere Employees Credit Union was facing both.

“A big challenge in banking is getting clients, in our case members, who are new to the credit union to change their primary financial institutions. Generally speaking, wherever they’re banking they’re content.”

Ryan, and his team are no strangers to sales training. Over the years they worked with several different organizations in an attempt to fine-tune their process, but they still weren’t satisfied with their results.

“We measured how many new members we had coming in and how many of those made us their primary institution from the beginning and it was about 18% of 3000 members – It wasn’t very good.”

Like many other clients of A Sales Growth Company, Ryan and his sales leadership team found ASG through the book Gap Selling.

“I read Gap Selling and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy’s read my mind, this is exactly what I was trying to explain.’ Me and my sales managers all read the book, discussed the book, worked on even trying to expose our team members to the concept.”

The sales team was already making great progress, the sales leader’s vision for what their outcomes could be were coming to light but they believed they could be even better still. The team had grown their conversion rate from 18% to the low 30% range. In the end, however, Ryan and his team at Deere Employees Credit Union reached out to ASG in hopes of pushing their sales team to their full potential.

“When we got with A Sales Growth Company we said ‘all right can we take ourselves over the edge here?’ We went from below 30% conversion rate to 44% of all of our new members choosing us as their primary financial institution. Not of just 3000 members a year but closer to 7000 members a year. Significant, significant growth in a relatively short period of time.”

Improvements like these would make any sales leader happy, but they don’t tell the full scope of the improvement.

“Our old process where we would ask our members to self-discover or self-diagnose their problems – we’ve scrapped all of that. We’ve gone from this lengthy process, cutting it down by at least half, if not 75%.”

Time is money as they say, improving your sales metrics and giving them additional time to talk to clients that’s a true win. Ryan didn’t stop there. While again happy with the results he needed to make sure they were properly implementing the processes they learned in the training.

“Keenan put the exclamation point on the whole thing with the call reviews to say, ‘Are you actually taking this – what we’re teaching you and applying it correctly?’ Turns out we weren’t. We were doing well. It was good, but it wasn’t as great as it could have been. And for my managers to be able to listen to Keenan coach our team, that was probably worth millions in the long run for us.”

If you or your organization are facing similar issues, click here to schedule a discovery call with our sales team to learn if we can help you implement a new sales strategy.