Colleen’s Blog

When I facilitate a workshop with a group of sellers, we inevitably start talking about all the different ways that you can communicate with clients. There's social media, email, Zoom, Skype, Abobe, etc. All of these virtual tools allow you to communicate more broadly and effectively with your clients.

Last week, we talked about being nice, staying focused and getting to work and I mentioned that being nice was so important because people do business with people that are motivated, successful and happy. One of the ways that we can show that in our business is to be confident.

Today, we're going to talk about value and specifically selling value instead of price. If I had to guess, 75% of the times that I'm in front of an audience, the salespeople say, "My clients don't care about value. They only care about price and they're just driving us down to this race of zero margins."

Many sales managers are complaining about their top sellers because they're not team players. It goes without saying that top sellers have to be acting in a legal, moral, and ethical manner at all times. We also want them to get along with people, but they don't need them to be team players.

Turnover, specifically sales turnover, hurts your business. How do I know this? Recently, I've been working with some clients who have suffered some devastatingly bad losses because of sales rep turnover.

In the next 5 years, we are going to lose 33% of all inside sales jobs that are focused on order taking, and I estimate that over the next 10 years, all of those jobs will be gone for good.

Most companies take a reactive approach to client retention and that is the wrong way to think about this issue.

This year, my team and I have had the pleasure of working on some really interesting projects.

Our team spends a lot of time working with our clients on compelling value propositions and client testimonials. There are two ways to use client testimonials that are often overlooked that I think are some of the most powerful uses of this type of content.

Last week, we talked about proposal formats. Therefore, it makes sense that we talk about presentation formats this week.