Colleen’s Blog

Today, your customer sees you—the seller—before you see them. That means we no longer live in a sell-to marketplace. It’s a buy-from world now. That shift has important consequences for how sales pipelines are built and what you use them for.

It’s a friction point that holds you back from achieving sales success: buyer objections. If left unchecked, those objections will stop you dead in your tracks from being able to present a compelling proposal to your prospective customer. And that puts you at risk of landing fewer deals. The more objections a buyer has, the more likely it is you have a fact-finding mission on your hands.

More than ever, you need a proven approach to sustain your business now and position it for success in the economic recovery that’s coming. Even with everything difficult that is happening in the world right now, there’s some good news on the business front.

“We didn’t see it coming.” That’s what an exasperated client of mine said to me recently when they lost not one, but two big accounts due to unforeseen internal changes within each customer’s organization.

These days, my clients are concerned about two significant barriers holding them back from hitting their sales targets. You’re likely facing these as well.

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!