Insights on Incentives has as its sole purpose the facilitation of thought and discussion on the subject of incentive compensation for banks and credit unions.  Once a month NSS will be sending out an e-mail with one insight on the area of incentive compensation.  The insights will come from our research, discussion with customers and finally, those of you who decide to offer an insight on this important sales management issue.

The debate continues on the importance of the use of cross-sell versus balance growth as the strategic metric for customer retention and driving profitability. In some cases we are seeing both used in incentive compensation programs.

So the operative question is which one to pick if not both. The answer is don’t spend too much time dwelling on it because we are seeing banks and credit unions that use either one succeed in driving revenue, increasing retention and increasing profitability. The difference in success levels is not in the metric, but in the execution of the program to improve sales and service performance.

You also need to monitor your success by correlating cross-sell and /or balance growth with customer retention rates, revenue growth, and profitability. This is an important view that the person at the top needs to ensure that their sales improvement program is working and if not spend more time examining execution as opposed to evaluating the appropriateness of the metric.

Insights on Incentives is brought to you by NSS Corp.