Colleen’s Blog

Is your sales team doing enough to build their current relationships? When you close a sale with a new client, you create a new relationship that needs to be nurtured. All too often, salespeople make a sale and then move to the next prospect. When a salesperson continues this trend long term, their client retention is going to fail...it’s inevitable! I hope you’re helping your team think ahead and make a plan to increase their sales in 2018. But, as you know, client retention is just as important as client acquisition. Here are a few tips to help you maintain and build your current relationships in the New Year. Be sure to pass this information off to your entire sales team so that they can develop their relationships:

Is your business experiencing wild swings in revenue? This may surprise you, but putting too much emphasis on closing business is actually counterproductive to increasing your revenues. What?! Let me explain.

Generating leads is great, but if none of those people are actually going to end up working with you, or do but turn out to be an entirely wrong fit for your business...what good is it doing?

Like many sellers, you’re wrapping up your fiscal year soon, so it’s time to close-out your year strong. Now, more than ever, it’s time to get real about your sales: knowing what you can realistically close now, as well as what to target in the coming year. Why? Because too often, we engage in avoidance behavior: putting-off problems until later, when they need to be tackled now. That’s at the root of a lot of mistakes I see in the marketplace today, and is a key hindrance to sales acceleration. Stop kicking that can down the road. You need to plan and execute each of these steps to get real in 2018:

Firing people is never pleasant. Regardless of your personal relationship with an individual, in a business environment, if a seller is doing more damage than good, it's time to think about their role on your team.

This year has been the year of international travel for me. As I write this I'm on my last overseas trip for the year, kicking off a new project in France. As a sales expert, I watch interactions everywhere, and it's fascinating to see how different cultures interact personally and professionally. Here are some interesting observations:

There has been much debate on my LinkedIn article regarding cold calling. I've discussed it in-depth this year especially, as in 2017 and beyond there are simply more effective prospecting methods available today.

It's fall, which always means a lot of travel for me, and this year is no exception. We threw in a vacation for good measure, and as I'm writing this post I am sitting in my first ever southern hemisphere destination, Sao Paulo. As always, travel is a great way to observe the buying and selling behaviors of the global community. Here are 4 lessons I have learned in the last 12 weeks: