Colleen’s Blog

When I ask sales teams what's the number reason why their pipeline isn't more full—how come they're managing a pipeline so lean it's going to be impossible for them to hit their targets—they give me an excuse. They abdicate responsibility, claiming that their marketing department has not provided them with enough leads. You have to be responsible for your own pipeline.

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.

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.

I was working with a CEO and his management team recently and the CEO said, "If you're batting 300, you would be in the hall of fame." It was a great reminder to salespeople that we don't win all the business.

I have been thinking a lot about pipeline building recently, specifically, a sales rep requirement to not only look short term at the deals within their pipeline that they should be closing, but also to look into the future in order to build the pipeline that they need to close business in the first place.

Today, I'm decreeing a ban on corporate marketing materials for salespeople. I want to ban salespeople from using them, ban marketing teams from producing them, and maybe even ban the entire industry. Why?

I get called in a lot to help companies grow their sales and whenever a company is not growing the way they want or not hitting their sales targets, I take a look at the pipeline because I know it is the #1 reason why people aren't growing their sales.

In my line of work, I've noticed that the vast majority of sellers don't prepare for sales calls and leave opportunities on the table.

Someone once said that everything old will become new again eventually. Recently, I read some research in Forbes Magazine that talks about how in 2018, one of the biggest trends for B2B sales lead generation is going to be live events.

Your buyers want to co-create the solution to their problem with you and be part of the solution process as opposed to being told what to do.