Colleen’s Blog

I often get asked: what is considered a normal close rate and how do I improve it?

Today, I will be exploring how you can improve the metric of sales cycle length: how many days it takes to close a piece of business. If you can move that, for example, from 90 days to 80 days or 120 days to 90 days, you can dramatically improve your sales velocity.

You can sometimes learn a lot from your dog. I have a relatively new puppy at home and there's one thing I noticed about her that all salespeople can learn from: you've got to ask for what you want. Indeed, the biggest reason salespeople don't get the sale is because they never ask for it.

Sales velocity is incredibly important because it is the measure of revenue that you bring in per person each day. It's a great indication of the future success or the gap you are creating based on a variety of key measures.

It's important to remember that we create the gatekeepers—they're all in our own mind. If we create them, we can get rid of them.

I often get a number of questions from clients about sales productivity enhancements: how do we sell more in less time, how do we bring our sales ratios down, how do we bring our closing speed down, or how do we bring our average order size up? There is one way to achieve all of those: through engagement.

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.

One thing that I know all top performers have in common is that they're really good at self-assessing such as asking questions on what they did well on.

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.

In my community, there is a very big named sales trainer who came out during a presentation recently and said, "Your job as a sales rep is to push your value proposition hard and often enough until the customer either buys or walks."