Colleen’s Blog

Years ago, I was at a large gathering of CEOs: all sharp thinkers who want to see their companies grow. While I'd been invited to address their forum to talk about the sales process, what many of them really wanted to ask me about afterwards was where they fit in that process. Specifically: do CEOs need to get involved in selling, and if so, when?

No one in sales has an unobstructed 360-degree view of their relationship with their customers. Nobody. Not even top performers.

The days of the "ideal buyer" have gone the way of the dinosaurs. So has the routine sales pitch.

You can't be afraid of your own pricing.

There isn't a buzzword out there today that's more dated than the notion of you being in "partnership" with your client. The fact that it's still used so irritatingly often in business today should give you serious pause.

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

"How can I sell more?" I hear that question a lot from salespeople everywhere. More often than not, it's framed around a false assumption: the belief that you need to get more to sell more.

Where is your sales prevention department? You may have one without knowing it!

It used to be that buyers needed to know you first before they could trust your product. Today the reverse is true.

Over the past few months, due to travel restrictions, companies have been conducting more and more product training sessions. I'm not opposed to product training, but it's critical that we don't pitch product features to our customers. Instead, what we need to do is transition product training into value training.