Colleen’s Blog

Despite changes to our selling marketplace, too many sales professionals are rooted in beliefs about customer engagement that simply aren't true. That's why today, I'm going to dispel the three big sales engagement myths.

I recently completed a number of studies regarding sales leaders and their salespeople. And one element that keeps resurfacing is that their salespeople are reporting that they want their leaders to be more solutions-oriented. When I examined this closely to determine what that specifically meant, I discovered salespeople want—during a coaching session or sales meeting—the sales leaders to help them solve their problems.

I want to highlight a sales strategy I’ve noticed perform incredibly well as of late. We started calling this the “land and expand” strategy.

Time-based branding makes it as easy as possible for your customer to find you and buy from you. Get this right and you will unlock new growth in even the most competitive of marketplaces.

I recently spoke with a couple of high-performing salespeople about the various accounts we were managing. And one of them told me that he had been calling a particular customer for ten years before he finally got the break he needed to win their business. During one of his sales calls, he realized that he wasn’t just calling a single shop. In actuality, they had 120 locations.

There’s one thing I’ve noticed with organizations and people who are really good at bringing new business: they are good at operationalizing value. These organizations and people have closing ratios higher than the average: 40% to 45%, as opposed to the average of 25% to 30%.

There's a truth about gatekeepers that you need to be thinking about. Namely, that you create them. You read that right. You're creating your own gatekeepers.

Every time your customer makes a buying decision, they deal with risk. They ask: “What if I make a mistake? What if things don’t work out? Can I be sure I’m making a good choice? What’s the cost of failure?”

   I’ve been working with organizations to help them understand what their internal best practices are for selling and what behaviours are really driving top performance. And one of the central themes being noted by top performers across multiple organizations is team selling.

If you follow my work, you may be familiar with my belief that the most critical part of the sales process is between getting someone to say yes and when that order actually comes in. The shorter you can make this time period, the less likely you are to lose the sale.