Colleen’s Blog

 There are four straightforward sales goals that I would like to share with you. They are simple, effective and will help you set the right targets and keep you on track throughout the year.

Why does team selling work? 

Did you know closing ratios on deals that employ traditional selling methods (e.g., cold calls and direct mail) have not changed since the 1980s? Seriously. They’ve not budged at all since “Eye of the Tiger” was a hit song on the radio. And yet there are still salespeople and team leaders today—four decades later—who remain stubbornly fixated on this entirely outdated way of looking at sales.

When I started selling decades ago, we were told that we wanted to be the trusted advisor or partner of our customer. To this day, I still hear people saying that. However, it's an outdated cliché.

I want to highlight three important questions that buyers are asking themselves right now. Knowing how to deal with these three questions will help you attract and retain more customers.

One of my clients recently told me that they wanted to divide their sales team up into “hunters” and “farmers.” It's not an ideal structure in my mind, but they wanted to go through with this and believed it was best for their business. Thus, I tried to find ways to make it work for them. In particular, here’s what I discovered. 

This week, I want to examine the ideal client. Because, far too often, we have a superficial picture of what the ideal client looks like.

I want to share with you a concerning trend involving your prospects’ trust and what you can do to fix it.  We are indeed seeing issues involving trust from buyers right now. Who can blame them? It's an incredibly volatile marketplace and it's going to continue this way for some time. However, it’s important for us to recognize that buyers currently lack trust not necessarily because they lack trust in you, but because they lack trust in themselves.