Colleen’s Blog

When I started selling decades ago, we were told that we wanted to be the trusted advisor or partner of our customer. To this day, I still hear people saying that. However, it's an outdated cliché.

This week, I want to examine the ideal client. Because, far too often, we have a superficial picture of what the ideal client looks like.

I want to share with you a concerning trend involving your prospects’ trust and what you can do to fix it.  We are indeed seeing issues involving trust from buyers right now. Who can blame them? It's an incredibly volatile marketplace and it's going to continue this way for some time. However, it’s important for us to recognize that buyers currently lack trust not necessarily because they lack trust in you, but because they lack trust in themselves.

“Buyers have changed and loyalty’s dead now. Customers don’t care about the relationship anymore!”  I’ve been hearing that whine a lot from sellers. Most recently, it was from a client of mine, saying: “I’ve been supplying my long-time customer with free donuts and baseball hats every month for the last 20 years and now they’ve suddenly moved to the competition!”

As you may know, I like to keep up on the state of the current buyer: what's going through their minds, how are they behaving, and how are they rewarding or not rewarding sellers like us?

Far too many sales organizations focus only on the internal KPIs (the things that drive your performance): sales velocity, sales process, your funnel, your pipeline, the number of calls you make, the number of conversions you make, your closing ratio, or your average sales cycle. 

Recently, a Canadian colleague of mine needed to travel out-of-country and wanted to purchase medical coverage for COVID-19. I happily referred her to my business insurance broker. But what happened next sure did not go the way either of us had expected.

I was working with a group of sales managers at a workshop a few weeks ago and one of them introduced this strategy. It was a very simple strategy of implementing an account plan when you didn’t have a sophisticated account planning process.

Chris and I spent an afternoon scuba diving with the team at Key Dives. What an exceptional experience they created for everyone on the boat! And, as usual, I can distill a number of lessons that you can use to grow your business from my experience. Here are the top three: 1) Expertise matters but it must be captivating as well. The captain of our boat was a commanding and authoritative man, but also fun and likeable. He had charisma and rapport with his crew and guests that made you want to listen to him. Diving is fun but also risky, and the briefings are critical for everyone's safety. Our captain held the entire boat with rapt attention. As a contrast, when was the last time you saw a flight attendant receive 100% attention to their preflight briefing? Lesson: Bored customers learn nothing (and buy nothing).