I’ve been a buy-side executive most of my professional career.  I never counted, but my guess is I’ve “experienced” over two-thousand face-to-face encounters with sales people, five-thousand phone calls, and probably twenty-thousand emails, voice messages, text messages, and old-fashioned letters.  As you can imagine, I’ve seen all kind of sales strategies, methodologies, techniques and gimmicks ranging from the truly outstanding to the very ugly.

Interestingly, I only remember the extremes: the 10% of the very best sales campaigns and the 10% of the very worst.  The 80% in the middle are undifferentiated fuzz in my mind.  If I remember your name and the company you represented, there’s a 50/50 chance I either loved you or hated you … not personally mind you, but professionally.

Citigroup’s CEO Vikram Pandit told theWSJ “If the [economic] trends continue, we’re going to have to keep up with the size in Asia and so these investments are going to be substantial”.  Are tears welling up in your eyes?  As a sales professional, don’t you love to hear such optimism?

As I pointed out in an earlier FASTalert (Citi – A Technology Spending Star Rising In The East), Citigroup is placing a big bet on Asia.  The bank now has more than 700 branches across Asia, and Mr. Pandit said that number will reach about 1,000 in three to four years.

U.S.Bancorp’s CEO Richard Davis likes “consistent, predictable, repeatable performance” with no surprises.  In describing the bank’s Q3’10 earnings performance, he says “… it may not be that exciting, because it doesn’t have a lot of unexpected outcomes, but it is one that we’re proud of and we’re excited to tell the story”.  ‘Old-fashioned’ banking (a phrase CEO Davis used several times during the earnings conference call) is a guiding principle at USB.

For U.S.Bancorp, financial performance has been anything but boring and unexciting.  Diluted EPS is up 88% year-to-date, and true to form, USB has not reversed loan-loss reserves to artificially boost earnings.  (See Bank Earnings Booming, But Don’t Fall Into The Trap!)  The top line is growing too; USB reported record revenues in the third quarter.