Colleen’s Blog

It’s important to keep finding things to remain positive about while in a crisis. To that end, I’ve talked about why it’s important to keep moving during tough times. It is equally important, however, to safeguard the way you think. Never lose your ability to be objective, anticipate, and adapt to change.

How much attention are you paying to the way your sales team is engaging with their buyers? Why, you ask? Well, there's a big difference between the way mediocre or poor performers interact with their buyers compared to how top performers do. Average salespeople view and regard their prospects as one of two things: 1. superior to them or 2. inferior to them. Let me explain.

As we approach the last few weeks of the year, salespeople often find themselves either coasting into the new year because they have accomplished their sales goals, or they find themselves pushing hard because they have struggled to reach their sales targets.

   Here’s an idea for all of you planning your sales kickoffs or big sales meetings with all of your team present: rather than just having a number of outsiders come in and talk about their motivational, sales, or consulting principles, have somebody come in and interview your top performers.

When we're making a sale, we're asking someone to make a change—a change in business, strategy, software, people, or products. However, more importantly, change is difficult. If you start thinking about selling as managing a change management process, it really helps you to speed up sales and set yourself apart from the competition. Why? Because your buyers, indeed, don't like change. They're scared of change and making the wrong decision.

Whether it's a prospect or a client you've been doing business with for years, you need to over-communicate, not under-communicate. Far too many sellers believe that no news is good news. If they have a problem they are trying to resolve and have not resolved it, they just won't call their customers. This stems from the fear that the customer will either not like their progress or response. Thus, these sellers hide and under-communicate.

Years ago, I had a client based in Northern Europe and they were a ships services company. Their sales VP told me, "Colleen, we have a long and proud history of losing all the RFPs where we have the incumbent relationship." I had to think twice for a second and did not know what he was talking about.

I was recently with a group of sales leaders and one of them admitted that he had sales reps who didn't use CRM. And this sales leader was from a top-performing company with around 40-50 reps who are consistently over their targets both from a volume and margin perspective. While it was commendable that he was willing to admit that his sales reps had CRM deficiencies, it's a shame that those salespeople were not using a tool that would make them much more effective.