Colleen’s Blog

I’ve noticed something about sales managers, companies and even salespeople. They tend to overcomplicate the selling process. Could members of your sales team be falling victim to this trap? There are only four things that you need to do in every single sales process, so keep it simple.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what makes a successful salesperson and I realize that one of the key components of all the top performers that I talk to is resilience. They are absolutely committed to keep going even in the face of adversity.

One of the things that I’ve noticed that really holds salespeople back is their inability to ask for the sale. Well, I shouldn’t say "inability" because everybody is able to ask for the sale, many of us are just not willing to. We fear rejection. You can be a great prospector and a great negotiator and you can handle all the objections, ask all the right questions but if you never ask for the sale, then you’re never going to get the sale.

I made many observations at Dreamforce 2016. One of the major points I noted about Dreamforce is that they have built an entire community around customer success and Salesforce.com.

What are you doing to shorten the time between when you get someone to say yes and when the order actually comes in?

Haven't I said this before? Today I attended the Salesforce for Sales keynote. Thanks to the Sales Cloud team, Tim Clarke specifically for the great VIP Seating. I have to admit, I sometimes fall into that grizzled, jaded, old sales vet mode, and think, "come on! Do we really need all this new fanged technology to sell?" The answer is no. Unless, of course, you want to sell more in less time with greater ease and with more profit. In that case, the answer is absolutely yes! Teams need to be equipped with mobile technology, and a fully functioning CRM. <--- Click to Tweet I would also encourage you to consider the following technologies that are proven to increase conversion rates:

It was a gorgeous day in San Francisco today and another busy day at Dreamforce! I spent the day with Adobe in the Adobe Sign Signature Lounge shooting video and talking to people about the future of sales.  You can check out my Facebook live interview with Joe from Adobe here. The message about community obviously resonated with people as it's had over 1.5k views today. We started our conversation about creating customer experiences. I believe that customers and employees want to experience a community. Dreamforce is an example of a customer experience community that we should all strive to emulate. Dreamforce is a community where:

Interesting observational research moment today during my session at Dreamforce. In a room full of 400 sales professionals, I made the case that there is no more B2B or B2C and that all selling was B2All. I stated that "the way I buy shoes, is the same way I buy $1 million dollar telecom equipment for my business." There was a visceral reaction. People in the audience older than me, (let's call them 50+) shook their heads in disagreement. People in the audience younger than me smiled and nodded enthusiastically. After the session ended I had the same responses as I spoke to people.