Feature

When Jeff Peek took on the top job at CIT in 2004, he and his team decided to expand the company's horizons. "One of the first things we did was tell analysts that we wanted to take the company—which historically had 2% to 4% growth—and make it into a company with 15% growth," says Peek, who is Chairman and CEO of the New York-based commercial and consumer finance company. "We wanted to create a strong growth culture."

The driver behind this change was not crisis, but opportunity. Operating successfully for nearly a century, CIT today is a FORTUNE 500® company with offices worldwide and some $65 billion in managed assets. With that foundation, Peek and his team looked ahead and saw the potential to grow CIT significantly by building on the company's traditional strengths.

"CIT was a diamond in the rough," says Walter Owens, the company's Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. "It had a great brand image, terrific customer relationships, and a solid history in managing risk and finance." The company wanted to complement those assets with a stronger approach to sales in order to meet their new growth targets.

"We needed to transform the sales force—to take the sales organization from being good to being great," continues Owens, who was brought on board last year from GE Commercial Finance to help CIT make that transformation. "We knew that on the people side of sales, we had to do things differently."

To drive that change, the company worked with Hewitt to envision new talent management processes for the sales force. The result: A unified set of people programs designed to build and support a high-performing, best-in-class sales organization. As these programs are rolled out, it's clear that they're enabling the company's transformation into a powerful growth culture.

The Critical People Element
CIT's transformation effort began with an internal survey conducted in early 2005 that assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the sales organization. "We looked at the unique characteristics and success factors, and we asked people what areas should be a top priority in terms of building a best-in-class sales team," says Owens. "The great news was that the salespeople and the management team came back with consistent answers about the need to change the sales organization, and they suggested some of the areas we needed to go after."

From those insights, Owens' team decided to focus on three initiatives: bringing in sales automation systems to increase efficiency, supporting the sales force with sound market intelligence, and creating a strategic approach to hiring, developing, and maximizing sales talent.

The sales talent initiative was critical. "We clearly needed to drive the size and quality of the sales force, and build it out quickly," says Owens. But it was not just a matter of adding people. To ensure sustainable results and profitable growth, the company wanted to enhance the productivity of individual sales representatives and develop great sales leaders.

Owens and his team knew that those results would not be achieved with fragmented initiatives that targeted one or two aspects of the sales organization's processes. Instead, Owens says, they believed that it was critical to address the entire process, from recruiting to development to measurement, in a comprehensive, holistic manner. "We weren't thinking of a quick, short-term fix," he explains. "We understood that unless we put in a real end-to-end process, we wouldn't realize our goal of creating an effective growth machine."

Owens and his team turned to Hewitt for help. "CIT was essentially starting from scratch in this area, so they wanted to take the opportunity to do things right, and develop a comprehensive framework to enable a bigger and more robust sales force," says Macaire Pace, the Hewitt account executive responsible for the overall relationship with CIT.

The design and implementation of those end-to-end processes promised to be a daunting task. The company's sales force is spread across 25 distinct business units—such as home lending, health care, media, and systems leasing—that are organized into two overarching divisions, Specialty Finance and Commercial Finance. "Some of the advice that came back to us from Hewitt was that we may not want to do this for all of those business units at once—and we decided they were absolutely right," says Owens. Instead, the company decided to begin by focusing on eight business units, which would allow them to implement comprehensive end-to-end processes with a minimum of disruption, and then gauge the impact on sales results. The targeted units represented a cross section of CIT's business lines so that the team could build a framework which would eventually be applicable to the entire company.

Tailored for Results
One of the first business units targeted by the initiative was CIT's Home Lending Unit. The Hewitt team worked closely with Home Lending managers to tailor new tools and processes to the unit's specific needs, while maintaining enough underlying "generic" processes to allow CIT to leverage these efforts across the company. "That turned out to be the secret to our success, because that unit owned the creation of their tools. The line leaders truly appreciated the fact that the result feels like a home-lending process that supports their business, not a generic CIT process," says Owens.

Throughout the engagement, Hewitt consultants worked with CIT business-unit, sales, and human resources leaders. By the beginning of 2006—just 15 weeks after the effort was launched—CIT was rolling out a sales effectiveness framework to selected units. Key to the effort, says Pace, was "CIT's commitment to overall project management: They understood how critical this is to driving results." This commitment included having a full-time person in place on the sales team to coordinate the efforts of the Hewitt team, human resources professionals, corporate executives, sales groups, and business-unit managers.

Although the new end-to-end processes have not been in place long, CIT is already seeing clear results. In the Home Lending Unit, for example, the sales force has grown from 165 people to 253, and attrition rates that had been in the 45% range are now at 30%. What's more, even in the midst of all this change, the productivity of the unit's sales representatives rose 12%. "In very short order, they were able to ramp up the size of their sales force, reduce attrition, and increase productivity. That's a pretty powerful success story," says Owens.

Similar successes are being seen as other CIT business units get up to speed with the new processes and build best-in-class sales forces. Looking back on the results of the first quarter of 2006, Peek reported, "We saw terrific results from our investment in the sales force, as new business volume was strong and broad-based across all origination channels, and up over 50% from the prior year. The key drivers for this increase were a 22% increase in the size of our sales force, and a 23% increase in sales rep productivity, which led to record volume—a direct result of recent sales initiatives."

Looking Ahead
Now that the initial phases of the project are well under way, CIT is focusing on ensuring that the sales teams continue to adopt the newly developed processes and weave them into the fabric of the business. "We want to make sure that this lives beyond the implementation stage, and we're working with our HR teams to make sure we have the resources in place to achieve the full potential of this project," says Owens. To that end, the company has placed dedicated HR professionals on Owens' team, and others within the Specialty Finance and Commercial Finance divisions, who will help embed the new processes into the company.

With these resources, CIT is implementing the new processes in sales groups across other CIT business units. The approach has proved so effective that the company is considering many aspects of it for use beyond the sales organization. "We've come to recognize that this can be leveraged across other areas, such as risk, finance, IT, and operations," Owens says. "We believe that these processes can have an even broader impact on creating a growth culture throughout the company."

In the meantime, CIT, seeing a solid return on their efforts today, has the processes in place to continue building an effective sales force over the long run. "We've taken the people side of the equation pretty seriously, and we believe that's a major reason why we are starting to see the results that we are seeing," says Owens. "We believe that this formula is helping us build a best-in-class sales force, which is the key to creating a growth culture that will take us forward."

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