Colleen’s Blog

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.

   Here’s an idea for all of you planning your sales kickoffs or big sales meetings with all of your team present: rather than just having a number of outsiders come in and talk about their motivational, sales, or consulting principles, have somebody come in and interview your top performers.

Workshops and learning events can be the least effective—and for some, even the worst—places for your salespeople to get the training they need. You heard that right. Now, let me explain.

   We've seen a lot of very high performing sales managers that come through our program. And one thing I noticed was that most of them were never the best salesperson in their organization. In fact, the majority of them had very little sales experience. They had enough to be credible in the marketplace and they had enough sales experience to know what it is like to face rejection and to get a big win.

   A few months ago, I was privileged to be invited to a seminar hosted by Gartner featuring a small group of top level thought leaders in sales. There were about six of us around the table and we got a preview of Gartner's research that they were rolling out at their sales summit later in the year. We assessed and discussed the research—in particular, how it applied to our clients.

We recently experienced great success with our sales training programs. The customers involved received up to 200 to 400 percent return on investment just a few short months after the program was implemented—not after a year or multiple years, but indeed just a few short months.

When we're making a sale, we're asking someone to make a change—a change in business, strategy, software, people, or products. However, more importantly, change is difficult. If you start thinking about selling as managing a change management process, it really helps you to speed up sales and set yourself apart from the competition. Why? Because your buyers, indeed, don't like change. They're scared of change and making the wrong decision.