Colleen’s Blog

In my experience, there are two key elements that intimidate sellers and keep them from asking for a referral: ego and fear. I think you’ll agree with me, salespeople have big, healthy egos. This isn’t a bad thing, because we are trained to believe that we can sell even in the face of adversity and when the odds are stacked against us. In fact, in order to really thrive in sales, you must be able to sell even when it seems as though the chips are down. <-- Click To Tweet On top of that, we prefer to sell by ourselves. Each of us consider our own methods to be the most effective. We also don’t want any help when it comes to executing these methods.

There are sales lessons on every corner, all you have to do is look for them. Here are a three from this week.

Have you been working tirelessly on a deal with an influencer that you feel is going nowhere? It’s true, influencers cannot buy. They can only recommend to the people who can buy. But don’t underestimate them just because they aren’t the decision maker that you’re seeking. If the deal is feeling stuck, you have three options:

As we move closer to 2014, and sales kick off season in January, I’m going to be spending much more time in hotel rooms than at home (and more time in the air than on the ground!). I want to share a great customer service story I experienced last year at the Ritz Carleton Half Moon Bay. They provide service lessons we can all learn from:

You may find it interesting that our top sales performers we work with here at Engage Selling Solutions all look at closing a deal in an unconventional way. Where many people tend to consider a deal closed when a signature is quickly jotted at the end of a contract, top performers only consider a deal closed when the client is using the product and is fully enabled. ← Click To Tweet Once you start looking at closing in this new light, it begins to reap a wide array of benefits.

Warning – this is the most frank thing I’ve ever said to the Engage community. It comes after we launched a new offering last week, the Sales Accelerator program. It was designed to be accessible for everyone – both today’s and tomorrow’s sales leaders – with an early bird price under a hundred.

Do you feel like you're doing well with establishing trust with potential clients, but aren't seeing this trust translating to more closed deals? While getting the prospect to know, like and trust you is key to developing a business relationship and closing deals, it's actually only half of the equation. The truth is, trust alone is not good enough if you want to close the sale. So, what's the missing link? Clients are looking for experts in the industry to buy from, they want these experts to be able to provide value to their purchase and to be able to guide them to success. The obvious question is, how do you establish yourself and your team as a marketplace experts? Here are a few steps you can take to establish industry expertise.