Colleen’s Blog

Last week, we talked about being nice, staying focused and getting to work and I mentioned that being nice was so important because people do business with people that are motivated, successful and happy. One of the ways that we can show that in our business is to be confident.

Do more: it’s an expectation imposed on sales reps constantly. Every year, quotas go up, KPIs get revised and the number of people that need to be served keeps climbing. And…it’s happening in a selling market that’s changing faster than ever, and putting a lot of pressure on sellers. When people are pressed, many are prone to make bad decisions: going overboard with sales work, often in a scattershot way, hoping something—anything—will hit their target.

This week, I had the pleasure of addressing 400 top Financial Services professionals at a national sales conference in Las Vegas. In fact, the image embedded to this blog post is the "backstage" view I had before the audience starting piling into the room. Here are the top 10 points from my keynote, they're the strategies that work today:

Today, we're going to focus on closing. This is the most often missed part of the sales cycle and it's critical that you ask for the sale to close.

Today, we're going to talk about value and specifically selling value instead of price. If I had to guess, 75% of the times that I'm in front of an audience, the salespeople say, "My clients don't care about value. They only care about price and they're just driving us down to this race of zero margins."

I've had many opportunities recently to sit in during sales meetings and presentations, and I have to be honest. Awful is the really the only word that comes to mind.

Are you considering raising your prices? Many salespeople look at raising prices with a grain of salt, a double-edged sword if you will. On one hand, raising prices means more earnings and greater profits. On the other hand, it could upset or scare away your current client base.