Improvements all round

UK bank-owned lessors are bottom of the pack in many areas of
selling finance- but there is still room for optimism
 
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If you believe the rumours, selling leasing is not just a
difficult art – it is also one that is in decline as brokers,
particularly in the UK, have sought to stamp their mark across the
industry.  
 
However, a sales team can still make or break a business – a point
driven home by the new head of Barclays Asset and Sales Finance,
Ian Stuart, in a recent interview with this magazine. He should
know – he spent two decades at Lombard honing the art. 

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Against this background, Leasing Life decided to link
up with two UK consultancies – Mercuri International and Interimus
International – to uncover the truth on a range of sales related
areas, from optimum ways of selling finance through to the
difference in salaries and bonuses between UK and continental
European lessors. 

The hard-hitting results, which are published on the next 12
pages of this report, are based on hundreds of surveys responses
from a wide cross-section of the European leasing market, from
sales support executives to sales directors. 

While both reports focus on the sales benchmarking theme,
Mercuri’s (pages 15 to 19) focuses on the way lessors go about
selling finance and draws qualitative judgments based on the
findings.The areas covered span the challenges involved in getting
new business, through to how well sales forces understand the
marketplaces they operate within. 

Research carried out by Interimus International, again working
in cooperation with Leasing Life (pages 20- to 24),
reveals how salaries, bonuses, target and productivity differ
between different types of European lessors, and how more customer
engagement and training will help to raise sales
revenues. 

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The results, in many ways, are shocking. It has emerged from our
report that, despite the widely reported fat cat wages earned by
many UK bankers, their leasing colleagues are not doing so
well. 

In this report’s ranking of average salaries by lessor type for
sales account managers,UK bank-owned lessors came a sorry last.They
also came bottom of the pile in terms of bonuses, and also provide
less training than all other lessor categories. For those lessors
around in the glory days of the 1980s, this represents quite a
turnaround in fortunes. 

Salaries 

Elsewhere on the salary front, there is good news in that the
difference in salaries between the north and south of the UK is
negligible. However, those of you who think the bad old days of
gender inequality are over, think again.Women lessors, still, are
being paid less than their male colleagues. Shame,
indeed. 

This report also reveals how many of you are looking for new
jobs – in or outside the leasing industry. Before you jump ship,
however, to a bright new career elsewhere in banking, do consider
another fact of interest that emerges from this report. Captive
finance lessors, far more than any of their counterparts, get paid
the most, and get the best bonuses. Food for thought,
indeed. 

In one lessor category, almost half are considering, or have
been considering, leaving the leasing industry.All the more reason,
therefore, to have a good strategy in place for ensuring staff are
replaced quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, in many cases this
does not happen – and in some cases it takes as long as six months
to replace a staff member. 

Rewards 

One issue of concern is that while most agree that better
selling techniques reaps financial rewards, a majority of
respondents believe much work still needs to be done in this area.
Also, over one-quarter claim that their “sales competencies” have
not been clearly defined.A lack of sales training could be to blame
– 42 per cent feel more needs to be done in this area. 

On a more positive note, some of the companies surveyed invest
more than 1 per cent of turnover on training.Overall, perhaps, the
solution to the gaping hole in available training is simply to get
leasing managers to provide more assistance in this area – after
all, many regard them as good coaches. 

But that even may not be the solution – the vast bulk of lessors
feel that training is not even implemented properly, a really sorry
state of affairs that clearly needs monitoring. Even worse, almost
one-third of respondents were unhappy with the quality of training
provided. 

The research does not look in detail at the link between hard
working and better trained sales people, and the ability of lessors
to win new customers. 

It may be the case that in the future the truly successful
companies will be those capable of doing precisely this, while
keeping hold of their long-existing clients. But, according to our
research, doing so will be no mean feat. In fact, it is almost
twice as hard to get business from a new customer as it is from an
existing one. Surely it gets even harder if the sales force is lazy
and its managers don’t know what they are doing. Nonetheless, it is
worth considering that, according to the Interimus findings, there
is no link between number of face-to-face meetings and target
success.