Colleen’s Blog

Last month, I was working with a client who told me that a core group of their targeted market was interested in speed because whoever gets there the fastest will win the business, regardless of price.

I just got back from rolling out a program in a part of the world that I've never worked in before. So, when a seller said, "Colleen, our market is different", I wanted to listen to make sure I understood where they were coming from.

There's an expression floating around these days that I love: corporate promiscuity. What exactly is that and how does it relate to us as sales leaders?

Want more sales? Of course you do. When you ask the typical seller how to create more sales, the mantra is generally to work harder, to grind more, or to double or triple the current efforts.

I have been thinking a lot about pipeline building recently, specifically, a sales rep requirement to not only look short term at the deals within their pipeline that they should be closing, but also to look into the future in order to build the pipeline that they need to close business in the first place.

Recently, I was overseas coaching a group of sales managers from the Middle East and one of them had a great question. He asked, "Colleen, how do I coach someone through ego?"

It is common for me to get questions like, "How do I get my sellers to reach their sales goals?" Here's my answer.

Today, we're going to talk about something that's profitable and easy to do, yet so few people do it. It's called cross-selling.

In the last year or two, my big, exciting projects have contained a significant coaching element. I know that when a client is engaging with me to help their sales leaders be better coaches, it's going to have a tremendously positive effect on their sales team.

In my community, there is a very big named sales trainer who came out during a presentation recently and said, "Your job as a sales rep is to push your value proposition hard and often enough until the customer either buys or walks."