Colleen’s Blog

“What do I do when my long-time customer calls me and says they want to renegotiate a deal we’ve reached previously?” I get asked that a lot by sellers and business leaders…especially these days.

It’s a friction point that holds you back from achieving sales success: buyer objections. If left unchecked, those objections will stop you dead in your tracks from being able to present a compelling proposal to your prospective customer. And that puts you at risk of landing fewer deals. The more objections a buyer has, the more likely it is you have a fact-finding mission on your hands.

I want to share with you a real-life success story from one of my clients in the oil and gas industry. He started to embrace non-traditional, social, and remote selling in ways he never had before.

I want you to think like your competitor. Why? Thinking like your competitor will help you figure out where you're weak and strong in the accounts you’re managing, which can lead to retention and growth activities.

We were taught at a very early age to never make assumptions. However, I still encounter salespeople who make assumptions all the time. I want to, in particular, highlight two tales of woe from clients who I discovered were making damaging assumptions.

A client once reported to me that the work we did with them last year is creating 35% more revenue to the company than it did in previous years. Now that's an exceptional result, but rather than just giving myself a pat on the back, I just hired him to sit down and dissect what we did for them so that I could let you know how to get the same results. I realized it was three basic things.

I have been coaching salespeople on negotiation strategies for over 20 years. And I’ve found sellers consistently make one mistake: they jump too quickly to lower their price even if they're getting something in return.

Silence is one of the simplest things a seller can learn to do, but it is the most difficult for them to execute in the sales process effectively.

Have you ever thought of debriefing your sales calls—the good, bad, or mediocre ones? It’s a great practice to get into.