Colleen’s Blog

We are now in September. As much as you may not want to admit it, the temperature is starting to drop and the leaves are beginning to change colors. Before you know it, you’re going to start hearing “Jingle Bells” playing on your local radio station! Are you on track to hit your sales quotas for the year? If you’re on pace to hit your goals for 2014, well done! Otherwise, now is the time to regroup and add some discipline to your sales game so you can end 2014 with strong sales results. Gone are the days that salespeople could make a living by waiting for the phone to ring. Today, only the most disciplined salespeople survive, thrive and achieve success. Here are a few tips to help you add some discipline to your daily routine:

When I think back over 20 years of my sales career, I've met only five kinds of people with behaviors that lead me to believe I should disqualify them as a prospect forever. I write about them in my recently released book Nonstop Sales Boom. You may have run across them in your work as well. They are: 1. The Shopper You learn that the prospect is considering two well-known competitors with whom they have a long, successful buying history. You are the last one into the process and the prospect cannot tell you clearly why they would consider an alternative, nor are they willing to allow direct communication with the decision maker. This is a sign that they are using you to compare pricing and features.

You’ve probably had to deal with professional criticism at some point (or often) in your sales career. In such a fast-paced, high-pressure profession that is continuously focused on results, we are often subject to our fair share of criticism from colleagues, managers, clients, and prospects. If you want to be successful in sales, you must train yourself to take criticism and use it to your advantage. ← Click To Tweet It’s easy to get wrapped up in your faults when others are pointing them out to you. But, there are steps you can take to efficiently move past the negativity and actually create success through the criticism that you receive.

You’ve heard it before. The dreaded “Let me think about it” objection is never something a salesperson wants to hear. Salespeople struggle with this objection because they don’t want to be “pushy” or “aggressive.” As a result, they usually thank the prospect for their time and move on. The worst part? They often never hear from the prospect again. The trick with this objection is determining whether or not it’s a real objection. Many prospects throw out the dreaded phrase because they want to get rid of you, while others really do need time to think. How can you tell them apart? Here is a highly effective technique you can use to uncover the real hesitation while giving you essential information so you can close the business.

If you’re doing research about your industry, your market and your competition...well done! Successful salespeople always make moves based on facts, not assumptions. However, if you’re not tracking yourself on a regular basis, you may be omitting your most important pieces of data. ← Click To Tweet When it comes to prospecting, it’s important to set a goal. But, you must also track your progress towards achieving that goal. If you’re not collecting your own prospecting data, you risk falling behind and reaching a point in the year where you can no longer recover for lost time. That's why I strongly suggest measuring the success of your prospecting activities each month. The objective is to ensure that your efforts add enough prospects to the top end of your sales funnels so you can achieve your sales goals. After reviewing your progress, take one of the two following steps:

Instructive new research from Software Advice a sales software comparison website about the likelihood of prospects answering unknown calls vs. local calls vs. toll free. "The idea is that people are more apt to answer a call from an unknown number if that call appears to be coming from a local number: this gets the caller’s “foot in the door.” But is answering enough? Does local presence dialing really open doors for outbound-sales calls, or does it only slam them shut?" The results clearly show that people are more apt to answer a local call than one coming in from a toll free number. Now...before you all rush out to try call ID spoofing (a practice where you fake a local call when you are not local) let's analyze what we are really seeing in this survey.