Colleen’s Blog

Is your sales team actively seeking out referrals from your current client base? According to recent studies, 78% of happy clients want to give out referrals. Yet only 8% of salespeople actually ask for them. Can you see the disconnect? It doesn't take a math genius to figure out that many salespeople are missing out on key opportunities to increase their sales and grow their businesses. How many of these opportunities are slipping through the fingers of your sales team? I understand the intimidation factor, but the truth is in order to achieve and maintain any kind of success in sales, you have to push through the intimidation and ask for referrals anyway. They are such a powerful tool to grow your customer base, and not having your team ask for them often enough is doing a major disservice to them and your business. Here's the truth, you will always get a rejection if you're asking for referrals the wrong way. Just like anything else, being successful with gathering referrals requires strategy. <-- Click To Tweet Consider this quick strategy to get the ball rolling:

Sales is an interesting game. You never know when the most (seemingly) minor slip up can cost you. <-- Click To Tweet Because of this, I want to highlight a few common, and not-so-common mistakes so that you can build awareness around them. Take time to read though each item on the list and consider the consequences of making such an error in your own business. The more real it feels to you, the more likely you are to take it seriously and avoid making it in the future. If you've already made a mistake highlighted in the list, relearn the lessons associated with it. A mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn from it.

Following last month’s post of what to stop doing in 2016 today, we will focus on what you can do to accelerate sales in 2016: 1. Create an Account Management plan that includes a monthly touch point with all of your current customers.  This could be a phone call, business review, courtesy call, email, call from the customer service team, call from your manager, personal letter, thank you gift etc. The options are endless, and the results are always a boost in loyalty and sales. 2. Ask for internal referrals every week. Plan who you want to be referred to and ask a direct question such as “I would like to meet your VP of the western divisions. Can I tell him about work we have done together?"

After a much needed, quiet three weeks at home, I started to travel for myself and clients in late January. Here is the round-up of the good, the bad, and the unexplainable. Use the lessons to elevate your own customer experiences. They could make the difference between a loyal client and a lost one.

Let’s face it, sales as we know it has changed, from how to attract distracted buyers to how to nurture a long-term relationship when loyalty is diminishing almost as quickly as our attention span. Fortunately there is new information that can help us make sense of this evolution, which in turn can help educate our sales teams as to what they need to do differently. But have you considered that possibly our sales teams as we would define them have changed as well?