Thomas L. Ransom currently serves as the Head of Sales and Client Experience Strategy for Truist Financial and he is an inaugural member of the banks’ Operating Council and the Executive Response Operations team. He is a twenty-plus-year veteran of BB&T and has led high-performing banking teams throughout the Mid Atlantic. His current responsibilities include leading and directing the strategic development, deployment, and reinforcement of the enterprise sales and client experience strategy. He helped lead the development of the “Truist Difference” and the Truist Integrated Relationship Management program. Mr. Ransom is a passionate client advocate
and that shows through his leadership of the CX and Client First Solutions teams.
Mr. Ransom also serves as Chair of Truist Financials’ corporate business resource group for Black teammates and allies and he sits on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. In that role, he works with Executive Management to produce strategies that help the bank retain, advance and recruit diverse associates and clients. Mr. Ransom leads the Truist HBCU strategy which is a groundbreaking collaboration effort to help ensure the success of those students and schools. This program is anchored on student engagement, scholarships and capacity building. Given the exaggerated impact of COVID on minority owned businesses, Mr. Ransom is leading a directed
effort to connect, support, and consult with those businesses to help them excel through this crisis. Representing Truist, Mr. Ransom has launched a groundbreaking partnership with the United States Black Chambers, Inc. to address the urgent crisis facing black owned businesses in America. He served on the Professional Advisory Council for the University Of Phoenix School Of Business and helped develop an entrepreneurship curriculum to support increased access to capital for minority-owned businesses. He has led, chaired, and been a member of over a dozen high-performing boards of directors and currently serves on the national board of INROADS, Grandbridge Real Estate Capital, Truist Leadership Institute, N.C. Bankers Association D&I Council and the Corporate Advisory Council for the U.S. Black Chambers.
Mr. Ransom earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at Hampden-Sydney College where he was a four year letterman on the football team. He was also selected to complete a fellowship in Public Policy and International Affairs at Princeton University. He subsequently earned a Master’s in Business Administration at the University of Baltimore and a Graduate Degree in Banking from Stonier held at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lauren: I have the honour of introducing Thomas Ransom. He is the Head of Sales in Client Experience Strategy at Truist Financial. He currently serves as the Head of Sales and Client Experience and he is also an inaugural member of the bank’s Operating Council and the Executive Response Operations Team.
He is a 20 plus year Veteran prior to this, of BB&T and he has led high performing banking teams throughout the Mid Atlantic. And I’m from the Mid Atlantic, so excited for that.
His current responsibilities include leading and directing the strategic development, deployment and reinforcement of the Enterprise Sales and Client Experience Strategy. He helped lead the development of the Truist Difference – and as a Marketer I love that – and the Truist Integrated Relationship Management Program.
He’s a passionate client advocate and that really shows through his leadership of the Client Experience and Clients for Solutions Teams.
So without further ado, I would like to turn the virtual stage over to Thomas Ransom. You are a Modern Revenue Leader and we – you have our attention.
Thomas: Thank you Lauren and thank you Kelvin for inviting me here. Listen, you guys did something that many people haven’t done, is get me and my former classmate, Sekou together. I followed him, so he’s a couple years older, but I followed him, followed him to Sydney, followed him to Public Policy International Affairs Fellowship, so, it’s great to be on here with him.
So let me just share with you a couple of thoughts. Sekou has already stolen my line. I truly am a country boy, OK. So, I’m the first in my family to actually go to college and grew up in Rowe, Virginia. And here’s the first lesson I learned, which is relationships matter. People do business with people they like and trust.
And so, that’s the very first principle I ever knew and I’ve taken that with me my whole life. There are really two key things that I want to talk about today, which is, it’s all about the client and the second one is living on purpose.
And so here at Truist, here’s an interesting thing. So you guys know, probably December of 2019, we announced this merger of equals, which is the tenth largest merge – actually it’s the larger merger in over a decade. And so we are now – we’ve made the sixth largest bank in the country.
So, we announced that and then what? COVID hits. So, we’re in the middle of building a brand-new bank. All of a sudden, you get this pandemic. Now, we’ve got to go remote. We have a time deadline on [unintelligible 00:02:51]. Of course we’ve made promises to our shareholders and our stakeholders and so the world can’t stop.
And so, what we’ve done – are really focused on those two things. And I want to start with the – all about the client. You have to, in every business, center on one thing. What’s your purpose? And that is to help our clients.
Whatever that tends to be. And then every goal, from the top of the house needs to begin with that. For us, our Number 1 goal in all of our score cards, is helping more clients through our go-to-market strategy.
And so, you begin with that. The hybrid strategy comes into place with this reality. You’ve got to meet your clients where they are. And so, if you go home and go into a remote environment because you have to, you just have to realize your clients – some of them don’t have that luxury.
And so, you still have to meet them. So, one of the things we do, is we made sure we built a voice of the client program, that will capture how our clients want to be served? How are they feeling? Let’s get that real time feedback. So I survey and listen to over a million clients a year.
And so that feedback then informs our strategy, right. It’s one thing to think you are serving your clients, but unless your clients agree with that and unless [Chuckles] your clients give you the feedback to say, “The way you are serving me is a differentiator,” it doesn’t matter. So, you have to integrate the voice of client program in that, in that aspect.
And then I want to look back to the second point, which is living on purpose. And that is the most important piece. It’s most important for a corporation to have that purpose, to live on purpose and then as a team member, to know your individual purpose, your why, right.
So, I’ve had my own personal purpose statement. It’s been on my work desk. It’s on my office desk here, which is to motivate and inspire people. To reach – to instill the sense of belief that you can do the impossible. But that is my own personal purpose. It connects with our corporate purpose, which is to inspire and build better lives in communities.
When those two things intersect, you get this powerful unleashing of potential. And so, I’ll tell you, when I go around the country and as I talk to sales teams I have five core principles that I think it’s been successful for me, so I’ll give them to you.
This is how I lead. But first, is gratitude. I don’t think as a people leader, [Chuckles] there’s a better value to have then gratitude. This is the ability to appreciate – to let people know you see them, you see their circumstance, you see their sacrifice. You’ve got to understand – particularly going through this pandemic – folks are spending more time at work, then they ever have in an environment where they need to be with their family more then they have ever been. So, you’ve got to show gratitude and appreciation.
The second one, empowerment. No-one likes a micromanager. If you hired me as a professional, give me the toolset, empower me to do the job – huge, huge believer in that.
The third thing is clear communication. I think many times what happens is you’ll have someone and they’ll go throughout the whole year, maybe they’re not performing the way they want. You shock them at the annual review. No-one likes that. Clear communication. These are your goals. Every month, this is where you are. Let’s agree, let’s align, let’s come up with a plan to move forward from there.
The fourth one, accountability. If I’ve empowered you, I’ve showed you appreciation, [Chuckles] now we’ve got to be accountable to deliver what the corporation needs us to deliver on.
And the fifth one, I think as a Sales Leader, is the most important, which is support. No-one wants the coach that is going to yell at you when you’re down on the ground. You just got ran over or you just got scored on.
You want that coach that’s going to jump in there, get in the game, pick you up, get in the fox hole, give you some tips and say, “Hey man. I saw what happened there. Let me give you some best practices. This is maybe how we might approach it the next time.” Teammates respond. The energy is built when they know that that leader is in there, they’re engaged, they’re in there battling with them.
So, I just want to leave you with those tidbits. Kelvin, Lauren, thank you so much for having me. Sekou, I didn’t bring that much wisdom, but I’m happy to follow behind you my friend.
Note: The following text is transcribed from the event audio. It’s largely accurate, but in some cases it may be a bit off due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It’s intended as an aid to understanding the event, but it shouldn’t be treated as an authoritative record.
