How will your bank wow customers amid digital transformation? Keep it personal

Today’s customers are more informed, more selective, and more time-poor. They need conversations that help them prioritize, decide, and move forward.

And yet, 58% of sales meetings fail to create real value.

Not because sellers lack capability, but because conversations are not designed to move decisions forward.

“Customers don’t act on every need they recognize.
They act when something becomes a priority.”

 In this short executive brief, you’ll discover

• Why most conversations inform… but don’t drive action
• What actually makes customers prioritize and move
• How to create urgency without damaging trust
• The shift from presenting solutions to enabling decisions
• What separates conversations that stall from those that accelerate momentum

If your teams are experiencing stalled deals, delayed decisions, or slow pipeline movement, this brief will help you understand why, and what to do differently.

In today's fast-changing business environment, excelling in Revenue Growth Management (RGM) is essential for Commercial Leaders aiming to boost revenue and profit, both now and in the future.

Unlike traditional methods that confine RGM to pricing actions, forward-looking Commercial Leaders recognize that activating a holistic, end-to-end RGM strategy that is consumer/shopper focused and customer-back, leads to more significant growth and allows leaders and teams to not only anticipate, but actively influence consumer demand and customer needs.

Historically, Revenue Growth Management (RGM) has been approached as a temporary and reactionary project, which was typically led by external experts in response to inflationary markets. This limited approach confined the benefits to a small part of the business and focused on short-term results, rather than embedding RGM as an ongoing, fundamental aspect of business strategy that could deliver sustained, long-term growth.

Today, mature RGM organizations treat RGM strategy and execution much differently, positioning the actions at the center of their strategic operations, embedding capabilities deeply within their organizational processes and ways of working. This transformation is not just procedural but is a shift that forces RGM strategy, tactics, and mindset into every action and function of the business.‍

Strategic integration of RGM at scale: A roadmap for success

1. Build strong in-house expertise: To see the scaled benefits of RGM, develop strong capabilities within your commercial teams and intermediate understanding of your cross-functional teams. When your leaders and teams fully grasp RGM tactics and mindsets, it creates scaled-impact that can be sustained without external reliance.
2. Encourage cross-functional collaboration: The effectiveness of RGM strategy and execution is only fully realized when it involves a fully cross-functional team. Promoting collaboration between sales, marketing, finance, R&D, and the supply chain enriches insights, strategy and execution feasibility, and organizational success.
3. Integrate RGM strategy into key business processes: By connecting RGM directly to critical operations such as budgeting and strategic planning, you ensure that RGM principles are woven into the fabric of annual planning instead of being treated as a one-time project. This integration influences everyday decisions and guides long-term business strategies.
4. Overcome implementation challenges with effective change management: Embracing a robust RGM approach involves substantial change and a shift in traditional revenue growth mindsets. Address these challenges through strong change management practices, aligning team incentives with new strategies and providing clear, successful examples of RGM in action to inspire and motivate your teams.

The competitive edge of building RGM capability across the organization:

1. Encouraging innovation from Consumer-Back: It’s no surprise that RGM should be activated starting with consumer and shopper insights. When truly building a strategy from the consumer-back, you build a mindset and process that is ripe for innovation. This helps your company stay competitive and lead industry trends and demands, instead of reacting.
2. Aligned decision-making for the short and long-term: A thorough RGM strategy speeds up and improves the day-to-day decision-making process of consumer and customer facing commercial teams. It helps ensure that decisions—like setting pricing strategies, choosing promotional activities, or allocating resources—are aligned with the market’s immediate needs and long-term goals for the category.
3. Boosting market responsiveness: In today’s volatile business climate, the ability to swiftly adapt to market changes is invaluable. Decentralizing RGM capabilities enables cross-functional local teams to be agile to market shifts in strategic ways, turning potential challenges into opportunities, while still staying aligned to the longer-term market objectives.
4. Cultivate a results-driven culture: Building RGM roles across the organization allows for greater ownership and accountability to improve revenue and ultimately grow market share. This means a greater population has a direct role to play in driving business performance and are responsible for keeping an external pulse on consumers, shoppers, and customers.

Implementing a cohesive RGM strategy, instilling the right mindsets, and providing the leaders and teams with the tools and processes needed to be successful, is no small feat. However, the revenue, profit, and market share impact can be substantial when an aligned RGM strategy is deployed at scale. This strategic commitment positions your company for enduring success and a powerful competitive advantage in today’s dynamic consumer, shopper, and customer landscape.

While small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in driving economic growth and innovation, they often face unique challenges when dealing with banks. This makes relationship banking crucial to their success. By strengthening their relationship banking models, banks can differentiate themselves from competitors by improving the support they provide to SMEs, helping these businesses overcome challenges and thrive in the marketplace. In discussions with owners of SMEs about their experiences with banks, four common concerns emerge:

1. Access to credit. Obtaining financing for purposes such as working capital, expansion, or equipment purchase is a significant challenge for SMEs. Banks often perceive them as riskier borrowers due to their limited credit history, lack of collateral, or volatile revenue streams, which can make it difficult to secure loans.
2. High interest rates and fees. SMEs may face higher interest rates and fees compared to larger, more established businesses due to banks' perception of greater default risk, as well as limited financial transaction volumes.
3. Complex application processes. SMEs often face time-consuming and complex loan application processes, requiring extensive documentation such as financial statements, tax returns, and business plans.
4. Inflexible lending terms. SMEs may struggle with inflexible lending terms, including strict collateral requirements, short repayment periods, or covenants that restrict operational flexibility. These terms can make it difficult for SMEs to manage cash flow and invest in growth.

By adopting the following approach, relationship managers can help businesses overcome these challenges:

• Advocate for clients within the bank, helping them secure financing for business expansion, capital investments, working capital growth, and asset accumulation.
• Offer guidance on optimizing cash resources within the constraint of limited capital resources.
• Provide advice on managing personal wealth accumulated through business ownership.

This approach requires a set of knowledge and capabilities:

• Business acumen—an understanding of SMEs’ unique needs and business challenges.
• Recognition of the essential role cash flow plays in small business success and an understanding of how to optimize it.
• Familiarity with the financial impact of bank products on SMEs' finances.
• Understanding of small business funding models, including the roles of owners, banks, and investors.
• Insight into the migration of SMEs to medium-sized enterprises.

Equipped with these capabilities and this knowledge, bankers can employ critical relationship management skills at four key stages:

• Planning. Gain local market knowledge and industry/sector expertise before engaging with clients.
• Discovery. Approach SMEs with a focus on their unique needs, recognizing the distinct characteristics of owner-managed and owner-financed businesses.
• Engagement. Position offerings from a client-impact perspective, rather than a bank- product perspective, addressing the specific needs and challenges of SMEs.
• Closing. Adopt a partnering approach and act as an advocate for SME clients within the bank, particularly when dealing with credit functions and decision-makers.

By focusing on these areas, banks can enhance their relationship banking model for SME customers, providing personalized support and tailored financial solutions to help small businesses succeed in a competitive landscape.

Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.

So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?

Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.

The limits of predicting from paper

Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.

This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.

The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.  

What counts as evidence

Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.

A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.

Why simulation holds up where other methods do not

When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.

That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.

It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.

For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.

What this means for how organizations think about hiring

Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?

AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.

A few principles worth building from:

• Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.

• Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.

• Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.

The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.

You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.  

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La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.

A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.

En este artículo descubrirás:

• Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
• La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
• Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
• Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
• Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.

La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.

Leadership is the work of creating shared understanding, and language is the primary tool for doing it. Yet we spend remarkably little time examining our words. Every decision, expectation, priority, and piece of feedback reaches another person through words. If those words aren't doing the job, neither is the leadership.

The lighthouse

Some years ago, a large company hired a strategy consulting firm to rethink its leadership model. The firm came back with a beautifully produced framework built around a central metaphor: the lighthouse.

Leaders, the model declared, should be lighthouses.

The metaphor quickly found its way into playbooks, performance reviews, onboarding decks, and town halls. People repeated it with the confidence of those who had paid a lot of money for it.

There was just one problem: nobody could agree on what a lighthouse was supposed to do.

Was it warning people away from danger? Guiding them toward a destination? Standing firm while everything else changed?

Eventually, the company hired another team to translate the metaphor into specific, observable leadership behaviors.

It was an expensive way to discover that a word everyone confidently repeated wasn't creating nearly as much shared understanding asthey thought.

Why jargon prevails

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Business jargon survives because it’s largely designed to manage social risk. Using it signals, I know how this world works. It demonstrates membership, competence, and credibility.

Business is messy, and leaders don't always have complete information. Abstract language lets us project confidence while preserving flexibility.

Altitude without traction

Specific language creates accountability. The more specific you are, the easier it is for people to disagree, question your thinking, orhold you accountable. That's part of the appeal of jargon. It creates distance between the speaker and the detail. The more abstract and elevated your language, the more strategic you sound.

A 2020 study by Harvard Business School professors Laura Huang and Andy Wu, published in the Academy ofManagement Journal, analyzed over 1,000 early-stage startup pitches and found that founders who spoke in abstract, visionary terms were significantly more likely to advance in the funding process.

A separate study, published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in 2025, found the other side: jargon raises how credible a speaker appears and lowers how much the audience retains.

The very language that helps people see you as a leader can make you less effective once you're leading.

The most trusted leaders tend to be the ones who resist impressive-sounding language and say the plainest version of what they mean.

In fact, four words probably do more for a leader's standing than any carefully crafted message: I made a mistake. Not "we encountered some headwinds," not "there were learnings from this experience," but the plain version.

The cost of comfort

When a conversation gets uncomfortable at work, it almost always feels easier to soften your message than to say exactly what you mean. You hedge, add qualifiers, cushion the point with extra reassurance, or leave the hardest part unsaid. Most of the time, you mean well. You don't want to discourage someone, damage the relationship, or create unnecessary conflict. The conversation becomes less uncomfortable for a moment, but the work often becomes harder afterward.

Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization, found that the fear of making a negative impression pushes people to stay silent exactly when clarity is most needed. According to her research, silence is one of the most consistent predictors of teams that miss problems early and never learn from them. The friction avoided in the meeting resurfaces later, at greater cost.

KimScott, former executive at Google and Apple and author of Radical Candor, calls this ruinous empathy: softening your message to protect someone's short-term feelings comes at the cost of the clarity they need. Her argument is simple and uncomfortable: clear, direct communication, even when it is hard, is an act of care.

The quiet power of saying what you mean

None of this is an argument for bland, colorless language.Vivid, precise writing does the opposite of jargon: it sharpens meaning instead of hiding it. Before reaching for a word, pause on two questions:

• What do I mean by it? 
• What will my audience hear? 

A surprising amount of corporate language wouldn't survive those two questions.

Leaders have more influence over language than they often realize. Whatever tone, vocabulary, and level of directness they model becomes the standard everyone else copies. Word choice is one of the quietest ways leaders shape culture.

This matters even more as we hand our language to AI. These tools can already learn to write in our voice. The question now is whether we've been deliberate enough about that voice in the first place to like what we see.