Mention the term “cross-sales” to average people, and one of two images will likely pop into their heads. Either they’ll picture (a) corporate types sitting around a boardroom table throwing around words like “integration” and “synergy,” discussing how best to influence consumers and improve the company’s bottom line or (b) a sales person asking if they “might also be interested” in a product in which they’re never, in fact, interested.

There is good reason for this. In most industries, sales employees don’t have the individual customer in mind when cross-selling—or, if they do, the pitch will still sound after-the-thought and insincere. So customers have learned to recognize and mistrust all cross-sales attempts. The standard defense is to tune out and look for the first chance to politely decline.

As service institutions, credit unions aren’t mistrusted in this way—a fact that can be a double-edged sword. It’s positive because the member is more inclined to listen to you, but negative because you might be hesitant to push a legitimately valuable product for fear of inducing someone’s gag reflex to transparent cross-promotion.

Most credit unions have yielded to this hesitancy in the past, according to Andrew Vahrenkamp, managing strategic advisor at CUES Supplier member Raddon Financial Group, Lombard, Ill.

“Many credit unions have a traditional front-line mentality of order taking: ‘Whatever the member asks for, I’ll give it to them,’” he says. “They’re being reactive to the member instead of being proactive—that is, saying we can save you money on this or this.”

However, Vahrenkamp says the industry is undergoing a “seismic shift” with regard to cross-sales, as more credit unions are holding front-line staff accountable for assertively promoting products. He attributes the shift to an increasing demand among credit unions for efficiency, as cross-selling can generate substantial margins compared to other marketing channels.

If that last sentence sounds too similar to what a suit in the aforementioned corporate scenario might say, think of it this way: Cross selling products, including credit and debit cards, to members actually strengthens your service culture.

“In my mind, the most member-friendly thing a credit union can do is cross-sell to members,” Vahrenkamp says. “Inevitably the credit union will save members money and improve their financial situation through better products, lower fees and better terms.”

You can start by cross-selling something that’s sure to offer a better deal than your competitors. Vahrenkamp suggests credit cards.

“If you’re a CU and you look at your product line compared to banking competitors, you’ll see there are a lot of similarities,” says Vahrenkamp. “But when you look at your credit card and compare it to the one the vast majority of your members have—at Chase, Capitol One, Citibank—it’s a night-and-day difference. The fees, late payments, rewards programs, delinquency default rates, policies about when payments are due or how much interest is calculated—it’s not even close, and there’s no reason why every single member doesn’t have your credit card.”

That’s not to say you should take every opportunity to push your card products (or any product, for that matter) on a member. Vahrenkamp is careful not to advise “aggressive” cross-selling. Rather, front-line staff should be honest and informative, leveraging data and technology to cater a cross-sales pitch to each individual.

Credit unions that take this approach to cross-selling have found that members are usually surprised and appreciative rather than annoyed at the attempt. Then again, they’ll see right through an employee with nothing but a smile and a script. Here are a few ways to ensure your cross-selling techniques will earn a member’s trust.

Commit to a Culture Shift

You can’t sell your credit union’s card products without a supportive environment. Creating a culture of appropriate selling should be your first step.

$375 million/42,867-member Connex Credit Union, with 114 employees in North Haven, Conn., is part of the cross-sales surge to which Vahrenkamp refers. The CU went through CUES’ ServiStar program, which is run by Michael Neill, CSE, president of Michael Neill & Associates, College Park, Ga. Like Vahrenkamp, Tansley Stearns, CME, CSE, Connex CU VP/sales and service, uses the term “order-taking” when describing the credit union’s old sales approach.

“I think the big thing for us and the big thing for credit unions generally is that this hasn’t always been part of our identity,” says Stearns, a CUES member.

It is part of Connex CU’s identity now, though, and Stearns says it only succeeded because all employees have put in the work.

“It’s not just something that happens naturally,” she says. “We’ve nurtured it for several years now, and we’ve worked really hard on our sales and service culture to build the infrastructure. We not only emphasize it with the staff but make sure they have coaches that are spending time with them, practicing with them, and catching them when they do things right.”

Twice a month, Connex CU employees take part in “member-service roundtables,” where they role-play different cross-selling situations. They practice using dialogue that emphasizes the service side of the pitch—speaking, for example, in terms of solutions instead of products.

Stearns says this reflects the ultimate commitment of Connex CU’s cross-selling strategy, which is to the financial well-being of the member.

“Our mission is to improve the lives of our members one person at a time,” she says. “When we talk about cross-selling, it’s really about the member’s need.”

“So we always want to start with ‘I can save you some time’ or ‘I want to save you some money’ or something that’s going to mean something to the member. If we say we have a great new checking account, it doesn’t mean anything to them.”

When cross-selling cards, “certainly we’d say something about how we could save them money,” Stearns says. “A couple of our main selling points are the money saved with a low interest rate and the piece of mind that comes with low or minimal fees.”

According to Vahrenkamp, it’s not just front-line staff who should talk and think this way.

“No training is successful without management buy-in,” he says. “The board and executive management have to believe it, they have to focus it, they have to take the training themselves, and they have to drive their daily interaction with staff on that concept—that is, we are here to sell to the members.”

Neill agrees. “One of the keys to having a successful cross-sales program is commitment of leadership. You have to be able to lead to create organizational change. As John Kotter said in his book, Leading Change, ‘The only real change in organizations results from behavioral change.’ Employees don’t change, generally, unless they are led to do so.”

Also, continue to emphasize the key concepts of your cross-sales strategy even when the culture and infrastructure are well established.

“Too often CUs will implement a sales culture, have the training and the buy-in, see the success, then rest on their laurels,” Vahrenkamp says. “Everything devolves back.”

Approach Incentives Carefully

Cross-selling isn’t always an easy and enjoyable venture, so most credit unions implement some type of external motivator. The nature of that motivator should cater to the personality of the credit union, as well as to the products employees are being asked to sell.

Connex CU sets goals for each staff member based on two criteria: referrals sent and referrals closed. Employees then earn monthly incentives based on their ability to meet and exceed those goals. These numbers also show up in their annual evaluations.

Neill says he is “on the fence” about incentives and is generally more in favor of recognition programs. Incentives alone, he argues, send the message that cross-selling is above and beyond the normal job and tend to give employees a sense of entitlement.

“This is almost indisputable: If you incentivize people with money without holding them accountable for failure to perform, it will never work,” he says. “People start to think, ‘this isn’t really part of my job. … It’s just an additional thing that they’re willing to pay me money to do, and if they don’t pay me enough, I’m not going to do it.’”

There are many ways to hold staff accountable. Neill says MNA tracks referrals for its clients, monitors calls and sends in “shoppers” who act as members and evaluate each employee.

Both Connex CU and Philadelphia-based TruMark Financial Credit Union employ shoppers and say they work well in maintaining a quality service culture.

“We employ an outside agency to shop our branches and our call center, and they’ll evaluate four different sections of the interaction that an MSR has with the member,” says Ivan Orrego, VP/branch operations at $1.2 billion/90,000-member TruMark Financial CU, which has 280 employees.

“The first section is the greeting, where employees must shake hands and use member names. The second is asking open-ended questions to gauge why [members are at the branch] and what they do and don’t like about the products they already use, which leads into the third section where we match a product to their needs. The fourth is the closing stage.”

Shoppers rank the interaction on a scale of 1-100, and TruMark Financial CU employees must score a 90 to obtain even a dollar in incentives.

“It really encourages high-level service and gives us the right behaviors that we’re looking for,” Orrego says. “If employees score well, they can usually make a nice return.”

Know the Member Before the Pitch

The most crucial part of cross-selling success is always tied to the equivalent of TruMark Financial CU’s “second stage”: obtaining information regarding what product might suit the member best. This is what separates your offer from the auto-pitches of every other institution out there.

“We really stress asking the open-ended questions that lead to a sale,” says Orrego. “We’re filling a void somewhere: something that we can do better, cheaper, with better returns or more security for our members, and to do that we need to fit the member with the product.

“We’ve made a sizable investment in our debit and credit card programs,” Orrego says. “These programs encompass CURewards points for cash, market-leading interest rates, and zero balance transfer options. We also can instantly create a personalized debit or credit card on the spot while the member waits.

“We realize the best products are useless unless we can get the prospect into a benefit comparison discussion. We have a great bunch of branch and call center team members who truly believe in what we do. Frankly, if they didn’t believe in TruMark Financial’s line of products and services, they would not be able to deliver exceptional service convincingly.”

And the more information you can give employees before they even greet members, the better. According to Stearns, Connex CU uses software called ResourceOne from CoreTrac, Austin, Texas, that can pull age and income data from the CU’s core system and determine each member’s consumer segment. Front-line employees have this information on hand, in addition to a list of products the member already uses, so they can take a needs-based approach from the start.

Pete Schmitt, executive director at CUES Supplier member PSCU Financial Services, St. Petersburg, Fla., says the type of software Connex CU uses has progressed quickly and can make cross-selling much more effective.

“Technology has come a long way in helping determine propensity models,” he says. “It’s far more productive using the data and technology available today than it was even three years ago.”

Of course, you don’t want to weird out members by awkwardly reciting everything you know about them in your pitch, so make sure to coach employees on how to make casual conversation.

“We really try to work the knowledge we have into the conversation, but another thing we coach our team on is having casual dialogue with our members and getting to know them,” Stearns says. “Members will look at it as much more natural if it’s part of the conversation and with somebody they can trust and know rather than just thrown in there.”

Throughout this process the member’s specific needs should always come first, but you can still prioritize products you’d like to sell. Neill says most of his clients rank the products they want to sell, then use software tied to their core processors to filter that list through individual member data.

“I’m a big believer in having the system prompt the employee on what to discuss with the member,” he says. “Just make sure it’s not giving them a script to follow.”

Call People at Home

Now that you’ve committed time and money to differentiating your cross-sales pitch from those of a pushy salesman, it may seem counterproductive to align yourself with telemarketers. However, as long as you structure calls around a service mantra, members are generally blown away by the gesture.

This has been the case for TruMark Financial CU, which makes multiple calls to new members. Orrego says the credit union uses a “2-2-2” strategy, calling the member within two days of an account opening, again within two weeks, and finally within two months. The objective of each call is different.

“Within two days, the employee who opened the member’s account calls to thank them for joining. It’s a service call, not a sales call,” says Orrego “The two-week call is also only a service call. We ask them if their checks were printed properly, or if their direct deposit was set up, or if they were able to log into our online teller. Only in the two-month call will we start to explore account-opening.”

TruMark Financial CU occasionally puts aside nights to make additional cross-sales calls, but these only work if the CU established a trusting relationship with the first three.

“If that first call that we made wasn’t a service call—if the first call would’ve been, ‘Hey, we forgot to mention our home-equity loans’—that’s going to really diminish the chances for success on future calls,” says Orrego.

Vahrenkamp also recommends calling people at home and says there are certain steps credit unions can take to distance themselves from telemarketers.

For example, call during reasonable hours. Make sure your number is actually showing up on caller IDs as the name of your credit union instead of as “restricted” or “unknown.” And, most importantly, leave a message.

“No one leaves messages,” says Vahrenkamp. “If you leave a message it really does resonate with the consumer that, ‘Oh, they actually wanted to talk to me; they weren’t just shooting for a quota.’”

Calling people at home can be “inordinately successful,” according to Vahrenkamp, especially when you’re calling to save them money.

“One of the big things in the news right now is the idea of an auto recapture program,” he says. “You find members have an auto loan somewhere else and you send them a note saying, ‘Hey, we can save you a hundred bucks a year on your auto loan.’ That can be effective by mail, but if you call with it, the response rates I’m hearing from the credit unions I work with is 20-25 percent.”

Schmitt shared a similar story about a PSCU client that had a Net Promoter^® score of around 80, but saw it spike to nearly 100 among members who the credit union called at home.

“Members were so overwhelmed by this type of service almost every one of them said they would recommend that credit union to a friend or family member,” he says.

That appreciation, according to Schmitt, is the main lesson to keep in mind when implementing a cross-sales strategy. He says that while credit unions shouldn’t cross-sell something that doesn’t provide value, the time is perfect to leverage members’ trust and develop technology to sell products more proactively.

“Cross-selling shouldn’t be perceived as selling a used car or have any other negative connotation,” Schmitt says. “Members today are thirsty for ways to save money, increase their convenience in banking and have a better understanding of their financial situation. And credit unions are a trusted source of information. So we need to be seeking solutions that educate and provide value to the member.” 

Jamie McMahon is a former CUES intern and a free-lance writer based in Madison, Wis.