Colleen’s Blog

Summer is not an excuse to stop selling. You don't have to give in to the idea that there are no sales to be made in July and August.

You may have noticed this interesting trend... Lost deals tend to be the same ones that stagnate during the proposal phase.

I'm currently working on a large project where I work closely with several sales managers. Unfortunately, I have been disappointed with their managerial qualities. This is because they don't practice coaching and exhibit leadership—skills that all of these sales managers are more than capable of displaying. However, instead, they make excuses, hang on to existing customers, and get engaged in customer service or delivery work—work that isn't their primary responsibility. As a result, their sales team suffers.

Sales velocity is a powerful metric that every sales leader must know inside out. While it measures how fast you're making sales and earning revenue, it gives you something even more valuable. You gain an understanding of the relationship between the four key activities that comprise your sales velocity: opportunities, deal size, closing rate and sales-cycle speed.

When I ask sales teams what's the number reason why their pipeline isn't more full—how come they're managing a pipeline so lean it's going to be impossible for them to hit their targets—they give me an excuse. They abdicate responsibility, claiming that their marketing department has not provided them with enough leads. You have to be responsible for your own pipeline.

I recently talked to a group of sales leaders. It was the last three days of their quarter and they told me, "Colleen, we have to admit: we are having a fire sale. We're doing everything we can right now, including deep discounts to push us over the end of the month because we are a bit behind and we want to finish the quarter on track."

If you want to make more sales, you have to think about this. First, understand that we live in an "on demand generation."

Some sales reps give up too easily. That is, they'll reach out twice, perhaps three times to a prospect before throwing in the towel and moving on. 

So far in this series—which looks at four adjustments you can make to improve your sales velocity — each activity has involved both a planning and execution stage.

Over the last few years, I have been working with a number of companies who have all formalized and institutionalized this process of demonstrating tangible return on investment with their sales teams by building return on investment calculators.