Colleen’s Blog

I get called in a lot when organizations are struggling to hit their sales targets. Generally, the first thing I'll do is look at their pipeline. Why?

There is absolutely a difference between how top sellers interact with people, compared to how mediocre or poor sellers interact with people.

I have a challenge for you, ditch your powerpoint. Do this for the next week, or even the next month. Wondering why?

I have a question for you. Do you really know where your revenue comes from? Most businesses can probably answer that question pretty quickly. It's obvious, right? Not so fast.

If you follow my work, you may be familiar with my belief that the most critical part of the sales process is between getting someone to say yes and when that order actually comes in. The shorter you can make this time period, the less likely you are to lose the sale.

I was recently talking to a sales rep who told me he had not taken a vacation in 5 years. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he saw it as a badge of honor and was bragging about it. I stopped him and told him that it's not a badge of honor to never take some time off. In fact, it's a sign that you are highly inefficient if you feel you can't go away for a few days—let alone a few weeks—and have everything fall out from underneath you. It's also a sign of a really unhealthy ego if you think that your business and your client will fall apart if you go away. You believe that you are the only thing that is holding the territory together. Stop it.

You may have noticed this interesting trend... Lost deals tend to be the same ones that stagnate during the proposal phase.

I recently talked to a group of sales leaders. It was the last three days of their quarter and they told me, "Colleen, we have to admit: we are having a fire sale. We're doing everything we can right now, including deep discounts to push us over the end of the month because we are a bit behind and we want to finish the quarter on track."

If you want to make more sales, you have to think about this. First, understand that we live in an "on demand generation."

Over the last few years, I have been working with a number of companies who have all formalized and institutionalized this process of demonstrating tangible return on investment with their sales teams by building return on investment calculators.