Aligning interests in sales organizations
In today’s competitive sales environment, success not only depends on hitting the right numbers – it is also essential to align different interests within the sales ecosystem. This is particularly true for complex sectors like banking and financial services. The sales ecosystem encompasses three key players:
- Sales management: Responsible for targets, growth, and strategic performance
- Sales representatives: Deliver the results and interact directly with customers
- Customers: The people whose real needs and expectations ultimately determine business success
But what happens when these interests diverge and come into conflict with each other? Often, a misalignment of interests leads to tension between management expectations, sales rep motivations, opportunities, and customer needs. Understanding and managing these conflicting interests is vital to building a sustainable and effective sales operation that achieves harmony between market needs, the availability of the products, and sales expectations.
The interests of sales management
The focus of sales leaders is on long-term value and strategic direction. From their view, the frontline salesforce should execute the playbook and reach the targets. Management’s key interest lies in achieving predictable performance, scalable processes, and data-driven oversight. Leaders are typically driven by performance metrics:
- Revenue growth: Increase in a company’s sales over a specific period
- Market share: The portion of a market controlled by a particular company or product
- Product penetration: How much a product or service is being used by consumers compared to its total estimated target market
- Cost of acquisition: Total expenses incurred by a company to make a sale
- Conversion rates: The percentage of leads or prospects who complete a desired action
- Other KPIs: Sales management also look at a range of other KPIs, including average deal size, sales cycle length and churn rate
Conflict arises when the pressure for short-term results leads to pushing products or targets that may not align with customer needs or rep capabilities and opportunities.
The interests of sales representatives
Sales reps usually find themselves stuck between management and customers. Most sales staff are intent on meeting their own targets, of course, but face-to-face interactions with customers also shape their motivations and interests. The daily reality of sales reps includes:
- Building trust with clients: Even if the rep does want to make a quick sale, integrity also counts – the best sales reps also look to create a relationship of trust with their customer
- Meeting individual sales goals: While the collective is important, sales reps will naturally tend to prioritize meeting their own goals first
- Fulfill management expectations: There is also pressure from above, with managers imposing expectations that might not align with those of the individual rep
- Navigating administrative tasks: Beyond making sales, there are also plenty of other considerations for sales reps, including admin tasks that can often get neglected
- Managing customer rejection: Direct contact with customers also has an emotional angle – dealing with regular rejection, for example, is not always easy to handle
Reps are typically incentivized through commission and short-term targets. In some cases, these can be in conflict with long-term brand values or consultative selling approaches. Their interest often centers around efficiency, simplicity, personal earnings, and customer satisfaction.
Conflicts can emerge when reps feel they are being micromanaged, overburdened with reporting, or forced to push products customers don’t want. Resentment can also build if they are not supported with the right tools, leads, or training. Disconnects can result in lower sales morale, attempts to hack the sales and compensation system, mis-sold products, or superficial customer relationships.
The real needs of customers
So what about the customer themselves? Customer expectations have changed and evolved over the years, especially in the world of banking. Here are some key interests:
- Personalized solutions: More so than ever, customers expect to be offered something they actually need and want. As a result, they are increasingly likely to reject generic product pushes
- Trust and transparency: Trust has always been vital in banking, but is especially important today, as customers carry out most simple transactions online and typically only interact with sales staff when making major financial decisions
- Convenience and omnichannel support: When so many products and services are available in an instant, patience is at a premium. For this reason, banks must offer convenience and omnichannel support as standard
- Long-term relationship value: As a sector, banking remains a long-term proposition – customers want a financial institution that they can trust to assist them in making lifelong decisions
Customers can sense when a rep is incentivized to sell specific products than fulfill their needs. In this situation, the customer may disengage, hesitate, or shift to self-service options. This reduces the opportunity for real relationship building and, as a result, kills long term and trust-based relationships.
These kind of issues often arise when expected sales volumes do not match the opportunities, or when the market and/or customer base is not properly targeted. Here, sales conversations are frequently overestimated – upselling is only effective if it doesn’t override genuine customer interest.
Issues also occur if the product mix cannot satisfy the customer needs, or if the incentive structure does not reflect the sales capabilities. Again, when the customer’s voice is lost in the chase for KPIs, long-term loyalty suffers.
The triangle of tension
The relationship between these three stakeholders can be visualized as a triangle:
- Sales management drives performance
- Sales representatives drive execution
- Customers drive demand
When properly aligned, these relationships create a virtuous cycle of value, where sales management encourage the reps to work hard and smart in a way that fulfills the needs of the customers. In turn, the customers reward the reps and management with trust, loyalty, and a fruitful and hopefully long-lasting partnership.
However, when these interests are misaligned, customers stop receiving the treatment and services they want, ultimately leading to a drop in overall performance. This causes internal friction, increased customer churn and inconsistent performance from sales reps. Sales managers may feel reps aren’t executing strategy, while the reps themselves may feel misunderstood and under-supported. Customers on the other hand, begin to feel unheard and unvalued.
Five steps to reconcile these conflicting interests
If you do experience these issues, how can you ensure that the conflicting interests are reconciled and instead create a virtuous cycle of value?
- Shiftfrom push sales models to consultative sales models
- Train reps for need assessment-based selling
- Reward sales quality – incentivize for customer satisfaction, not just for sales volume
- Empower reps to say “no” when a product isn’t the right fit
- Improvesalesenablement and tools
- Provide tools that streamline workflows and personalize interactions
- Reduce unnecessary admin to give reps more face-time with customers
- Improve CRM systems to help and drive the sales process
- Redesignincentivestructures
- Include KPIs for customer satisfaction, retention, and solution quality
- Blend short-term bonuses with long-term performance indicators
- Reward behaviors, not just outcomes
- Leadershipcoaching andfield engagement
- Have sales leaders regularly accompany reps in the field
- Foster an open dialogue between layers of the sales organization
- Celebrate frontline insights and wins
- Voice of thecustomerfeedback loops
- Include direct customer feedback in rep evaluations
- Use NPS and customer journey scores to influence strategy
- Share customer success stories across the organization
Harmonizing sales and banking customer experience management for long-term growth
By following these five steps, it should be possible to resolve conflicts of interest and establish a more fruitful and sustainable partnership between leaders, reps and customers. To do so, however, requires a firm commitment from everyone involved. Sales excellence and banking customer experience management doesn’t happen through force or metrics alone. Instead, it occurs the desires of align management, what reps can deliver, and what customers truly value are aligned.
The time for a one-dimensional focus on sales figures has passed. Instead, sales leaders must become facilitators of alignment – breaking silos, adapting processes, and focusing on mutual success. This change of approach requires openness, dynamic thinking and an ability to understand and coordinate the interests of everyone within the group.
The rewards, however, cannot be overstated. When the interests of all three players converge, organizations not only meet their sales goals – they earn trust, build loyalty, and drive lasting growth. In modern sales, alignment isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s your competitive edge.
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