Colleen’s Blog

The word "rapport" gets thrown around quite a bit in the world of business and sales. However, there are really two key types of rapport. Can you distinguish the difference between the two? It's important to understand the difference between personal and business rapport so you can move forward effectively when engaging with a client. ← Click To Tweet It also serves well to create a growth and retention formula to repeat sales and repeat customers every year. Once you understand both types of rapport, this formula becomes easier to create, and easier to put to use.

Did you know that closing a deal isn’t a true success unless you’ve asked the right questions? Today’s new, emerging economy requires proper closing techniques in order to close profitable business, build long-term relationships and to create a long-term competitive advantage. Many of the closing techniques that are currently in place leave the customer feeling used, manipulated or strong-armed. It seems as though the sales world is currently filled with salespeople who will say or do anything just to close the deal. The end result is a customer who doesn’t trust the salesperson or the business they represent, and in turn the customer loses faith in the company’s’ ability to solve their problems. It doesn’t stop there. The salesperson often begins to look at his or her client as too much work, or being ungrateful for they work that they do put in. As you can see, in such scenarios, nobody wins. Carl Young once said, “To ask the question is already half the solution to the problem.”

Looking for ways to amp up the energy of your sales team? There are steps you can take to create more energy and a more motivated sales team to generate greater results than you are already achieving. 1. Create excitement around the pipeline. 2. Rally around a simple, single concept. 3. Respect for the sales team.

Is your business experiencing wild swings in revenue? Contrary to popular belief, putting too much emphasis on closing business is actually counterproductive to increasing your revenues. Every time you close a sale you should be adding three to four more leads to your pipeline. When you’re concentrating too much on closing business it detracts focus from gaining new leads. Before long, you will have no new leads to close business with, and this is what causes swings in revenue or sales whiplash, as I like to call it! Don't worry, dear sellers, there are ways to avoid having this. Are you wondering how you can attain consistent revenue?

In a recent statistic released by Statisticbrain.com, last year there were approximately 5.134 billion Google searches performed each day. While they should be releasing their 2013 statistics at some point in the new year, there’s no doubt that the number has gone up. Seeing that statistic begs the following three questions:

Do you think that if your team has a negative attitude towards each other, it will translate to a negative attitude towards your customers? The answer is a definite yes. When a team expresses negativity it can never just be contained internally. It always gets expressed externally as well. Your customers will always be able to tune into any negativity your team may have about other team members, your product or services, your company, or the customers themselves.