Colleen’s Blog

Throughout this year, we’ve been talking a lot about the hallmarks, the characteristics, and the personality types of the top performers.

We’re approaching the end of first quarter for many salespeople and it’s a good time for us to take stock.

We've already talked about how the more time you spend doing a thorough qualification means you’re going to win more business. You now know what the most often missed question in the qualification phase is: the decision-making criteria, specifically the priority of that criteria.

Over the past 12 months, I have done some deep analysis of the sales pipeline, specifically looking for points of leverage that we can create more success with, as well as looking for any problem points that need to be fixed. Here's what I learned.

Most sales reps are making a fundamental mistake when handling the pricing objection. They're always trying to get the buyer to make an apples-to-apples comparison on the pricing and that’s not what we want. We want the buyer to be faced with an apples-to-oranges comparison. Now, why do we want that?

As a sales leader, you need to know how to be an effective coach. LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and even Oprah Winfrey have coaches - because they understand the power of an outside perspective to help them master their own games. So, regardless of how well a salesperson is excelling or exceeding their targets, you should never just "let them be" and hope that they continue to grow, develop, and produce results. The problem is, many sales leaders don't understand the difference between coaching, managing and simply shouting out directives and commands. Don't be fooled, the latter is NOT coaching.

It’s really common for people to set goals. In sales, if you don’t set goals yourself, you'll probably have someone setting them for you anyways.

My business mentor and good friend, Alan Weiss and I can agree on one thing. It doesn’t matter that you know your good, it matters that you know why you are good in the first place. Top sales people and sales managers don’t look at this closely enough. I believe that you only get better by building on your strengths and in order to be successful this year, you should understand what those strengths are. One of the hardest things that we can do as sales leaders is become conscious of what the top sales performers do subconsciously. Many top sales people will say, "I don’t know, I just go out there and win the deal." Well, we need to become conscious of all of those steps that either we do along the way as top sales performers and managers. So ask yourself, or your top sales reps these questions:

I was interviewed by one of Canada’s national magazines on the University education for sales people, as well as why there weren’t many sales programs offered and what courses should be offered for people who want to pursue sales as a career.

Are you prepared to combat a destructive virus on your team as soon as it shows up? Unlike the cold virus, the negativity virus has no "season" - it can show up in any given month, on any given day and without warning.  Similar to the common cold, however, it can be highly contagious and just one team member infected with this bug can quickly spread the virus to the entire sales team.