Colleen’s Blog

I travel for a living (it seems) and for the last two years I have been avoiding the US Connections area at Pearson airport like the plague. Why? To sum it up quickly, it's been a mess! Small cramped facilities, confusing steps that were not well communicated, multiple procedures that triplicated tasks, insufficient capacity for Global Entry, and machines that were constantly broken or out of order. Plus, mixing connecting and non connecting passengers meant the passenger loads were too high to process everyone in time to make flights. My last fight was delayed an hour simply because the system could not get everyone through security and customs on time. Not cool. Today, that all changed. The new procedures show excellent promise:

I spent the week with two teams of top performing sales professionals this week. Although I suspect that some of them will fall out of that position before too long. Here are my observations:

In an endless ocean of sellers that are often selling similar products and services, making your business or organization stand out is of the utmost importance. Being seen as a thought leader is, in today's world, one of the best ways to not only differentiate yourself from everyone else, but to have buyers chasing after you instead of the other way around.

If your sales are suffering right now, I want to make you aware of a shocking statistic. According to a study conducted by our friends at InsideSales.com, an incredible 30% of leads are never followed up on by the sales team when passed on by the marketing department. Can you believe it?! It doesn't matter if you have a client base of 10 people or 10,000 people. Ignoring 30% of your leads is a great way to create a sales disaster in your business. At the very least, I'm sure we can all agree that even if your sales are on target, that extra chunk of business can't hurt! Now that we have that surprising stat out of the way, let's discuss what's required in your follow up.

Sales people are a pain to manage and they are too expensive!

I've seen it happen over and over again - chances are one or more of your team members are guilty of doing this too... Picture this, you have a prospect that is interested in your product or service. It seems that bringing them on board as a new client is more or less a done deal. Your rep continues to sell to them anyway. They keep piling on and highlighting features and value that your prospect doesn't necessarily even need. The prospect begins to back off, they go from being interested and engaged to hesitant. The prospect decides they need to think about the decision...you never hear from them again. What happened? The sales rep fell into the "oversell trap" and lost a potential client as a result.