Recovering Sales for a Range of Products

Year-end, the General Management of Crédit du Nord announces a strategic intention: to recover sales for financial savings products.Recent market uncertainty had distracted customers from investing in financial products.
However, when products are contracted over a long enough period to cover the downside market risks, the return on market investment is likely to outstrip that of a traditional savings account, particularly after a period of rate cuts.
Attempting to offer the right advice catered to the planned duration of the client investment, accompanied by a clear explanation on risk and the return outlook, was a sensitive matter.
The initiative was a great success for the bank, and the customers heading this advice certainly benefited as well! Since January 2005, the CAC40 in France has jumped by more than 40%.

Blandine Simonin shares her experience
Head of Engineering and of Human Resources Development
Head of Training at Crédit du Nord
Also Project Leader at Crédit du Nord in the Financial Savings Unit

I have to say that when they entrusted this project to me, it seemed like a real challenge!
It was one of the first major training projects of its kind for the bank, even just in terms of the number of people involved. Up until this point, we had been attending seminars targeting an entire sector, but they were always stretched out over long periods and addressed small groups.
This was the first time a training session had reached to over 1,000 people in such a short period. The project was very important and was a true challenge for the company. But, the general management had high hopes.
And just to make the project even more complex, the length of training available was very short, the time-frame for fleshing out the idea was very limited, there was coordination among presenters from inside and outside the bank, prerequisites, and a quiz to monitor learning progress.

The commercial presentation was one of the project highlights.
We opted for Anderna because of its position compared to other consults. More than just wanting to convince us, they brought more ideas to the project, its goals and its importance.
It was also essential to have a guaranteed ‘level of service' regardless of who the consultant was. Initially, you meet the project leader, but later there must be ‘continuity'. So, in the end, the consultant's profile was the deciding factor. I have to say that on this point the team has lived up to Nicolas Caron's commitment in that the quality and homogeneity of the training was second-to-none, irrespective of the trainer.

In traditional training methods, the trainer provides content and adapts it to the context of the project. Here it was different. The starting point was our own tools. We also had to plan the training over two days led by two different consultants  and unity was fundamental - we didn't just want two courses that jumped from one to the other. We gave it our all on our side too - I was working almost full-time on the project until mid-February.
During the content-compiling period for the mock seminar, we had to be quick and flexible and we learned to move forward as a team. After the first mock seminar, what I loved was the way we ‘positioned' the information and goals at just the right level.