Colleen’s Blog

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

I've been working on numerous consulting projects recently, and I’m incredibly frustrated with clients who lost business for no other reason than they didn't see it coming.

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.

In earlier times—let’s call it 2018—it was common for sellers to be exclusively in control of their sales pipeline. They built it and moved prospects through it based only on inputs that mattered to their organization. However, just because those seller-focused pipelines were popular didn’t mean they were effective!

Your customer today is in a tough spot when making decisions. If you’re a seller trying to convert new prospects into buyers, you’re feeling the effect.

Too many leaders today are still stuck in a “behind the desk” mindset. They fixate on managing data rather than on managing their relationships with people.

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

All value-based selling—when done effectively—is about correctly defining the benefits of your product or service based on what matters to your customer. As I like to regularly remind sellers and leaders: the only value that matters is what matters to the client. The better you are at defining this, the better you become at building a broad array of connections that improve your closing ratio.

There’s a disconnect between the future of sales and the current popularity of two-tiered sales structures that include sales development reps (SDRs) combined with field reps. I touched on it in this article: let’s now explore that point in more depth.