Colleen’s Blog

You could be the world’s greatest salesperson selling the world’s best product, but if you can’t connect with your prospects, will your sales results reflect your expertise? If you can’t open a dialogue with prospective buyers, it becomes very difficult to sell a product or service! This is a common problem for many sales professionals, the inability to secure a conversation with potential customers. A certain feeling of frustration creeps in and it can become difficult to maintain the focus or motivation to keep trying. When you’re passionate about your product and its ability to help your prospect, the frustration tends to grow even more. Can you relate to these feelings? Chances are you have felt this frustration at one point or another. Want some good news? I have a few points worth discussing that will hopefully drive you to keep trying to initiate contact with your prospects:

Have you ever wondered why the most skilled salesperson on your team or in your organization isn't always the one who finishes the year with the best results? It’s true; your ability to sell often dictates how much you will end up selling. However, there are other variables to consider. One of the most important elements involved in greater sales results is where you place yourself. You can reach a certain audience behind your desk with a phone in your hand, but you will often be met with similar results week after week, month after month, and year after year. Stationing yourself in one place severely reduces your chance of achieving any type of scalability with your sales results. ← Click To Tweet Because of this, you are required to give some thought to creating and reinforcing what can be called a “sense of place.” To ensure that you are reaching a larger audience and increasing the number of prospects in your pipeline, here are five places you need to be:

The top 10% are like the Heat. They accept responsibility, regroup, refocus, and come back charging. They hit the court / office, make note of what didn’t work and what did, and leverage their strengths. Sure, take a breather after a big loss. Step away from your desk. Go for a walk, lunch, or take an afternoon at the park. But, while you are away accept that YOU lost the deal and only YOU can stage a comeback. Comebacks start only when you take responsibility and then take action.

You probably know that when all else fails, going with your gut will typically better your chances at creating success for yourself. There's nothing wrong with trusting your gut to make decisions, as long as there is sufficient planning and testing beforehand. The most successful sales leaders will not enter a situation so blindly that they need to rely solely on a feeling to make a decision. Hope or gut feelings alone will not guarantee that a new sales strategy will be successful once implemented. Instead, these successful sales managers, leaders, and companies base their decisions on tangible results. In fact, when new sales strategies are implemented with sufficient planning, your hopes and feelings toward successful results have a much stronger foundation to them. ← Click To Tweet Rather than judging an idea at merely face or surface value, successful salespeople test the idea, analyze it and evaluate their findings. Doing so allows these salespeople to decide with real data, whether or not it makes sense to implement the idea on a grander scale.

I'm trying to buy a pocket door for our bathroom and discovered that Masonite manufactures the perfect one. I look on their website and find a local re-seller and the first one that pops up is Florida Lumber. Great, they are open Saturdays! Chris pops down to place the order. The door should be no more than $450 Florida Lumber suggests an alternative manufacture that will cost between $650-$1100 and take 5-6 weeks to order. They also tell us that Masonite is out of business.  This seems odd since Chris and I were both on their website that day. Plus, we can't wait 5-6 weeks. Chris leaves empty handed and calls Masonite direct. Masonite is NOT out of business. They are alive and well, shipping products all over the US. Home Depot is now a re-seller so we call them, order the door, and are told it will be in in 9 days. Price is as originally expected. When we asked Masonite why someone would tell us a lie about them they responded with: