Colleen’s Blog

You've probably heard some of the buzz around leading with fear.

“Follow every step of this bulletproof routine every day and you’re sure to become a high performer in sales.” That, my friend, is terrible advice. And yet that kind of guidance keeps getting spread around as though it’s the plain truth—when, in fact, it’s just…well…bull-sourced fertilizer!

I was working with a group of high performing salespeople years ago—well before the pandemic. And one of them was whining and complaining to me about how he was losing all of his business to the competition. The competition was crushing him on price and all of his customers were price-sensitive. Everything was coming down to pennies on the dollar, resulting in him losing business.

It can feel like a big, scary problem when your customer starts demanding you renegotiate terms and prices on an existing agreement you have with them. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. As a sales leader, there are steps you must take to ensure you remain in the driver’s seat in challenging situations like this—no matter what.

This week, I want to explore sales goals. I know we all have them. Our companies set them for us, our leaders set them for us, and perhaps you set some for yourself.

Your greatest sales success will come when you stop using seller-focused pipelines in your sales process. As I explained in the previous article in this series, that old approach—while still common—is mired in assumptions that simply aren’t true anymore.

Imagine you're preparing a delicious meal and you're short on olive oil. Would you add vinegar to make that oil go further? Of course not! Those are complementary ingredients, not interchangeable ones. You can shake them together but soon they'll separate.

Decision paralysis is a real thing. It's when your buyers are so overwhelmed with information that they can't make a decision. Best case, they simply delay. Worst case, they cancel the project, spend their money on something else, or they just go with the incumbent. Neither of those options are good for any of us, especially when you're the incumbent.

Far too many sales organizations focus only on the internal KPIs (the things that drive your performance): sales velocity, sales process, your funnel, your pipeline, the number of calls you make, the number of conversions you make, your closing ratio, or your average sales cycle. 

We're a couple of months into the year and maybe you're behind. Maybe January and February didn't start out as strongly as you would like. It's not the end of the world. In fact, being behind the first quarter of the year is probably the best time to be behind. However, more importantly, you have to do something about it.