Colleen’s Blog

Are you present enough with your clients? A couple of years ago, I had just boarded a flight and noticed an attendant in the aisle helping another passenger find their seat. Behind her, a woman entered the plane, yelled "Excuse me!" and barged pass the flight attendant and then mumbled "well you do want to board, don't you?"

I've been thinking a lot about the state of sales, especially its state in the future. Here are some of my predictions and musings.

It goes without saying, but sales can be one of the most stressful professions out there, period. Your sales team is constantly feeling the pressure of hitting targets, keeping clients happy, ensuring the delivery of what was promised, and the list goes on. There can, as a result, be a natural tendency for sales professionals to "oversell" in an attempt to close more deals and hit their targets.

The other day, I got a call from one of my long-term coaching clients. He was excited because he had just blown away his sales numbers. He had a 7 million dollar quota and he closed 10 million, but he was also furious about being reprimanded for not putting in as many miles as the other field sales reps.

Have you ever taken a serious look at your pipeline? There are likely a few extremely valuable clues it's trying to tell you! Let's take a deeper look at this.

For the last few videos, I've been talking about client retention and expanding your network within your client accounts. From this, the response I always get is, "Colleen, I don't want to be behind my client's back because they might get angry with me and my relationship with them would erode."

The number one most discussed topic by my community in the past year has been surrounding cold calling. If you're an active member of my online communities, you may recall seeing much of the debate behind the statement I made...cold calling is dead.

Did you just do a double take? Don't close sales...isn't that counter-productive to our sales success? You heard me right. Salespeople should not be attempting to “close” sales with clients. It’s all in the definition.

If I was running your sales team and there had to be one thing that I would insist on, it would be this non-negotiable, mandatory behavior from all salespeople.