Colleen’s Blog

Last month, I had the pleasure of keynoting in Washington, D.C. at Alan Weiss's Million Dollar Consulting® Convention. Lisa Larter, who hosted a session at the event, recently shared a blog post and quoted some of the critical points from my keynote. The theme and key message was this: The buying process has changed and, in today's world, you can't assume it starts with you. I've included an excerpt from Lisa's blog so you can gain some of the same ideas I shared with the audience in April, plus Lisa's insights on your "silent" sales partner:

When it comes to buyer behaviour trends in the marketplace, I'm noticing—with research and my clients—that more and more buyers are utilizing social media to help them make decisions about products and services that they're buying in the B2B marketplace. I've seen some studies that illustrate that it's up to 85%. However, whether it's 50%, 60%, or 85% in your marketplace, you cannot ignore this trend.

Today, I will highlight what I've discovered about making training work—making it work in a way that you get and a way that will yield the highest ROI from your sales training dollar.

I was working with a CEO and his management team recently and the CEO said, "If you're batting 300, you would be in the hall of fame." It was a great reminder to salespeople that we don't win all the business.

One thing that I know all top performers have in common is that they're really good at self-assessing such as asking questions on what they did well on.

I've been working a lot with sales managers over the past few months and interestingly, we've been talking about recruiting, retention, motivation, and top performance. They all have one thing in common.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of research with our clients and a lot of reading on sales turnover rates because it's impossible to create a non-stop sales boom if you have high turnover.

Recently on my LinkedIn page, we've been having an interesting discussion on compensation plans. Over the course of my career as a consultant, I've met two or three sales leaders who like to have compensation plans that "keep their salespeople guessing" because they think it "keeps them on their toes."

We're finding that buyers are limiting contact with sellers to manage their time. In fact, Jill Konrath put it best when she said, "buyers are busy and long-term planning is sometimes only a few weeks."

Ten years ago, I was working with clients where we were focused on their business as a speciality item. One of the biggest banks in the world was one of my clients at the time and they were losing business to niche specialists.