Commercial Banking Sales Tip: Share Your Calendar

Banking is a team sport, and with increasing levels of competition and bankers’ movement from one bank to the next, it is important to communicate one’s activities to facilitate guidance from management, ensure buy-in, garner necessary support, and share accountability.  Sharing of one’s calendar creates opportunities for more productive conversations that leverage team members’ collective knowledge and sales skills and maximizes one’s time in driving new business, translating to more loans, deposits, and fee income.

A best practice of high-performing bankers is to have meetings booked for two weeks in advance so that new meetings are scheduled three weeks in the future.  This has the benefit of ensuring a constant flow of new business opportunities while also increasing the likelihood that your meeting candidate will be available at a time convenient for you both.

Guidance from Management

When a calendar is shared with a team leader, an opportunity is presented for a conversation about who the meeting is with and the purpose of the meeting.  This further evolves into how the team leader, team and other divisions can help to move a relationship forward more productively.

Recognizing that all banks are structured differently, Credit Administration may participate in such meetings to screen for non-starters or to identify potential issues that should be addressed during meetings.  Ideally those prospective customer profiles should be vetted prior to the meeting being scheduled (i.e., vet profiles three to four weeks into the future).

Obtaining Buy-in

Sharing one’s calendar also ensures that a team leader and relationship manager are in agreement about how time will be spent over the next two weeks.  This includes not just the actual meetings scheduled, but also the drive time, pre-call planning, the calling time necessary to schedule the meetings, as well as budgeting some time for placeholders to review loan packages, make entries into a customer relationship management system, and complete other administrative tasks.  This eliminates mystery about how time will be allocated giving both the team leader and the banker confidence in their actions.

Garner Necessary Support

Potential opportunities for a banker to be better supported will be illuminated through sharing his/her calendar.  A team leader can help identify resource needs and advocate for appropriate resources to increase the likelihood that the bank’s goals will be met.

Share Accountability

By sharing one’s calendar, accountability is also shared.  Together, a team leader and relationship manager can agree on how to best spend the most precious resource, time.  Accountability can be more fully shared, by the team leader sharing bankers’ calendars with the division manager to generate more ideas and obtain necessary resources.  After all, obtaining sales goals is the cumulative success of many activities undertaken over a period of time, and management, including executive management, has a vested interest in this success.