Colleen’s Blog

It's frustrating. When you see a sales rep struggling month after month, and missing target after target, it's enough to make any sales leader uneasy. The problem is most leaders handle poor performers the wrong way. There's a tendency to have "tough conversations" or attempt to punish them into higher performance. Some leaders even give poor performers the "cold shoulder" and allow a rep's professional performance to seep into their personal behavior towards them. These are all things that are extremely counterproductive and more often than not, contribute to more negativity and even worse performance. Luckily, there are strategies you can put into place to help improve their results. 

Most times, companies, marketing departments, executives, and even sales teams create value statements without understanding the value they can bring to the customer.

If we're connected on LinkedIn, you've probably seen many of my posts surrounding this topic. Cold calling is dead.

I am sick of sales managers complaining about their top sellers not being team players.

The winter Olympics are in full swing and I'll be the first to admit I'm a junkie! I just love competition featuring the best of the best worldwide. Of course, there are always lessons to be learned for us as sellers. Here are the top five from week 1.

Today, I want to talk to you about a process that we've been using with our clients that is helping them close more deals. We're using a buyers map to help unstick opportunities that are stuck in their pipelines.

You may have noticed this interesting trend... Lost deals tend to be the same ones that stagnate during the proposal phase. That is, after completing a needs analysis, the deals that are ultimately missed are often the same ones that sit, and sit, and sit in the proposal phase. Interestingly enough, in our research, we've also found that completed deals don't tend to stagnate in the proposal phase but they do spend more time in the needs analysis phase. In fact, completed sales on average spend two to three times longer in the needs analysis phase than sales that are lost. Let's go even deeper with this.

I want to build on the tips that I discussed with you last week about the sellers that you should not hire. Something that remains true is that we want to hire sellers who are well connected and back in the day, that meant that we hired sellers for their Rolodex.

Improving productivity to be a more profitable seller - everyone wants to do it, but few actually succeed at it. I'm providing some simple (but extremely powerful) strategies in this live video that you can apply to sell more in less time.