Colleen’s Blog

I often get a number of questions from clients about sales productivity enhancements: how do we sell more in less time, how do we bring our sales ratios down, how do we bring our closing speed down, or how do we bring our average order size up? There is one way to achieve all of those: through engagement.

A good sales organization centres around a good sales coach. In fact, coaching is what drives top performance in sales teams. More importantly, sales teams with coaches—who are being coached on average 3 hours per rep or month—see anywhere from 15 to 30 percent performance improvement compared to the organizations that don't have a coaching program.

We're approaching the halfway mark of the year (already!), will you hit your goals? At the beginning of the year, most of us had goals set for the next 12 months. There was a certain excitement in the air and the feeling of "anything is possible" in the minds of many sellers. However, flash forward a few months later, and many of those goals have already fallen by the wayside.

Your mindset is typically one of two things. It can either be one of your greatest tools or one of your worst obstacles. The good news is you get to choose which side of the spectrum your mindset sits. If there’s one quality every successful salesperson can share, it’s their overall mindset for success.

Salespeople notoriously do not follow up with leads that they are working on. They get distracted by new promising leads coming into the pipeline and they forget about the leads they are pursuing. Simply put, they give up too soon. They are concerned about being perceived as stalkers, resulting in the neglection of good leads.

Last month, I had the pleasure of keynoting in Washington, D.C. at Alan Weiss's Million Dollar Consulting® Convention. Lisa Larter, who hosted a session at the event, recently shared a blog post and quoted some of the critical points from my keynote. The theme and key message was this: The buying process has changed and, in today's world, you can't assume it starts with you. I've included an excerpt from Lisa's blog so you can gain some of the same ideas I shared with the audience in April, plus Lisa's insights on your "silent" sales partner:

When it comes to buyer behaviour trends in the marketplace, I'm noticing—with research and my clients—that more and more buyers are utilizing social media to help them make decisions about products and services that they're buying in the B2B marketplace. I've seen some studies that illustrate that it's up to 85%. However, whether it's 50%, 60%, or 85% in your marketplace, you cannot ignore this trend.

Today, I will highlight what I've discovered about making training work—making it work in a way that you get and a way that will yield the highest ROI from your sales training dollar.

The number one question I get from sales leaders: how do I get my sellers to ask for more referrals? Sellers are notoriously bad at asking for referrals in a business to business environment because it makes them sound needy, helpless, or desperate. How do we rectify this fearful mindset?