List one of your most significant professional or organizational accomplishments. Describe your precise role and how it has shaped your management skills.
After 3 year track record of achieving complete business turnarounds in our branches in Connecticut (ABC Bank), I was prompted to take charge of the north-eastern zone (New York, Connecticut and New Jersey). I had been entrusted me with the task of scaling the business – in addition to deep re-structuring that lay ahead. The goal was to strengthen the company’s market share in Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) banking and drive significant increase in revenues from the segment.
On taking charge, I realized that we were adding new customers as desired – however, Income in terms of Deposit of Funds and Account-related Fees had just not materialized. After thorough internal discussions and analyses, three important areas of concern came to light:
- The Morale among the 110 sales personnel was abysmally low. They were meeting just 2-3 customers per day when the business needed a minimum of 5 “quality interactions”. This happened primarily because the sales team lacked focus on the targeted set of customers and the training to handle the specific, knowledge intensive queries from varied clusters of SME clients.
- Our strategy of meeting the needs of SME client’s lacked focus. We did have a strong product portfolio; however these products did not fully cover the unique requirements of the specific set of customers in question. From my extensive meetings with these customers across various locations, I realized that “a single product for all customer types” offering would not meet their varied requirements – as an example, a typical Poultry farming SME customer had requirements very different from those of a typical jewelry manufacturer. Each of these clusters had different Collection and Payment cycles that were dependent on unique supply chains