Colleen’s Blog

It's important to remember that we create the gatekeepers—they're all in our own mind. If we create them, we can get rid of them.

Micromanaging often gets a bad wrap in the professional world. But, could it actually be a good thing? Look, the term micromanage can have different meanings to different people.

I often get a number of questions from clients about sales productivity enhancements: how do we sell more in less time, how do we bring our sales ratios down, how do we bring our closing speed down, or how do we bring our average order size up? There is one way to achieve all of those: through engagement.

We're approaching the halfway mark of the year (already!), will you hit your goals? At the beginning of the year, most of us had goals set for the next 12 months. There was a certain excitement in the air and the feeling of "anything is possible" in the minds of many sellers. However, flash forward a few months later, and many of those goals have already fallen by the wayside.

Your mindset is typically one of two things. It can either be one of your greatest tools or one of your worst obstacles. The good news is you get to choose which side of the spectrum your mindset sits. If there’s one quality every successful salesperson can share, it’s their overall mindset for success.

Salespeople notoriously do not follow up with leads that they are working on. They get distracted by new promising leads coming into the pipeline and they forget about the leads they are pursuing. Simply put, they give up too soon. They are concerned about being perceived as stalkers, resulting in the neglection of good leads.

Last month, I had the pleasure of keynoting in Washington, D.C. at Alan Weiss's Million Dollar Consulting® Convention. Lisa Larter, who hosted a session at the event, recently shared a blog post and quoted some of the critical points from my keynote. The theme and key message was this: The buying process has changed and, in today's world, you can't assume it starts with you. I've included an excerpt from Lisa's blog so you can gain some of the same ideas I shared with the audience in April, plus Lisa's insights on your "silent" sales partner:

Ultimately, your clients are looking for solutions to their obstacles or problems. The perfect solution presentation follows a series of steps to help facilitate this. You never want to present solutions to a client without being strategic!

In today's world, you either decide to be digital or you decide to be dead. What's your choice?

We're finding that buyers are limiting contact with sellers to manage their time. In fact, Jill Konrath put it best when she said, "buyers are busy and long-term planning is sometimes only a few weeks."