Colleen’s Blog

"Why aren't we just doing what our biggest competitor is doing?"

While striving for success, it's important that you don't forget about your accomplishments!

Good deals get stuck when you lack access to the right people to successfully close a sale.

Could flexibility be the key to success in 2021?

Salespeople, business leaders, and shareholders thrive on having reliable and realistic sales targets. Without them, you can’t possibly gauge performance. Setting those sales targets, more importantly, hinges on being able to consistently anticipate the future.

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.

I recently spoke with a couple of high-performing salespeople about the various accounts we were managing. And one of them told me that he had been calling a particular customer for ten years before he finally got the break he needed to win their business. During one of his sales calls, he realized that he wasn’t just calling a single shop. In actuality, they had 120 locations.

   A few months ago, I was privileged to be invited to a seminar hosted by Gartner featuring a small group of top level thought leaders in sales. There were about six of us around the table and we got a preview of Gartner's research that they were rolling out at their sales summit later in the year. We assessed and discussed the research—in particular, how it applied to our clients.

Recently, I was working with a client on some planning for their sales team. Specifically, we were creating action plans for every sales team members so that they would know how many calls, emails, meetings they need to take in a given day, week, month or year in order for them to hit their goal.