Colleen’s Blog

Your customer today is in a tough spot when making decisions. If you’re a seller trying to convert new prospects into buyers, you’re feeling the effect.

The most successful organizations I work with right now are nimble. That means they are quick to conduct meetings and action important ideas. If you want to successfully come out of the economic crisis, you have to embrace nimbleness.

Ready to hire a new salesperson or salespeople for your team? Do this before hiring!

Too many leaders today are still stuck in a “behind the desk” mindset. They fixate on managing data rather than on managing their relationships with people.

Decision paralysis is a real thing. It's when your buyers are so overwhelmed with information that they can't make a decision. Best case, they simply delay. Worst case, they cancel the project, spend their money on something else, or they just go with the incumbent. Neither of those options are good for any of us, especially when you're the incumbent.

All value-based selling—when done effectively—is about correctly defining the benefits of your product or service based on what matters to your customer. As I like to regularly remind sellers and leaders: the only value that matters is what matters to the client. The better you are at defining this, the better you become at building a broad array of connections that improve your closing ratio.

There’s a disconnect between the future of sales and the current popularity of two-tiered sales structures that include sales development reps (SDRs) combined with field reps. I touched on it in this article: let’s now explore that point in more depth.

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. 

Creating and maintaining a high-growth, high-profit business in your marketplace—one where sellers, leaders, and customers all thrive—is essential. That’s why, for many years, I’ve advocated putting value-based selling at the centre of your work.

Some sellers (erroneously) believe that they should be attempting to sell to anyone and everyone. This is, counterintuitively to some, an excellent recipe to create a disaster.