Colleen’s Blog

Why does team selling work? 

Did you know closing ratios on deals that employ traditional selling methods (e.g., cold calls and direct mail) have not changed since the 1980s? Seriously. They’ve not budged at all since “Eye of the Tiger” was a hit song on the radio. And yet there are still salespeople and team leaders today—four decades later—who remain stubbornly fixated on this entirely outdated way of looking at sales.

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 However, it's an outdated cliché.

You cannot grow your business with a particular client if you're relying on a singular point of information. Growth comes from not only the quality of contacts, but also your quantity of contacts in a particular organization.

I want to highlight three important questions that buyers are asking themselves right now. Knowing how to deal with these three questions will help you attract and retain more customers.

I recently worked with a client on a new program and got the opportunity to interview a few of their sales managers. I wanted to identify what differentiated top performing managers from poor performing managers. There was one aspect, in particular, that stood out.

It’s one of the biggest challenges you face with a new customer: scouting out the landscape of their organization and determining who the decision makers are (and aren’t).

I recently had a conversation with a really smart sales VP who said, "I need my team to remember that our job is to provoke our customers. It's to make people think. It's to bring them new ideas that they had never thought about before."

Recently, I talked about customer loyalty and how it’s your job—not theirs—to create ideal conditions for them to stick with you. But what about within your organization? It matters here, too.

Are you pushing the sale too hard with your prospects and clients? Look, we all know sales is about persistence. Sometimes though, sellers don't know when to slow down on that persistence and actually repel the client away.