Colleen’s Blog

I recently completed a number of studies regarding sales leaders and their salespeople. And one element that keeps resurfacing is that their salespeople are reporting that they want their leaders to be more solutions-oriented. When I examined this closely to determine what that specifically meant, I discovered salespeople want—during a coaching session or sales meeting—the sales leaders to help them solve their problems.

I want to highlight a sales strategy I’ve noticed perform incredibly well as of late. We started calling this the “land and expand” strategy.

Time-based branding makes it as easy as possible for your customer to find you and buy from you. Get this right and you will unlock new growth in even the most competitive of marketplaces.

I recently spoke with a couple of high-performing salespeople about the various accounts we were managing. And one of them told me that he had been calling a particular customer for ten years before he finally got the break he needed to win their business. During one of his sales calls, he realized that he wasn’t just calling a single shop. In actuality, they had 120 locations.

There’s one thing I’ve noticed with organizations and people who are really good at bringing new business: they are good at operationalizing value. These organizations and people have closing ratios higher than the average: 40% to 45%, as opposed to the average of 25% to 30%.

Every time your customer makes a buying decision, they deal with risk. They ask: “What if I make a mistake? What if things don’t work out? Can I be sure I’m making a good choice? What’s the cost of failure?”

   I’ve been working with organizations to help them understand what their internal best practices are for selling and what behaviours are really driving top performance. And one of the central themes being noted by top performers across multiple organizations is team selling.

If you follow my work, you may be familiar with my belief that the most critical part of the sales process is between getting someone to say yes and when that order actually comes in. The shorter you can make this time period, the less likely you are to lose the sale.

   Here’s an idea for all of you planning your sales kickoffs or big sales meetings with all of your team present: rather than just having a number of outsiders come in and talk about their motivational, sales, or consulting principles, have somebody come in and interview your top performers.

   We've seen a lot of very high performing sales managers that come through our program. And one thing I noticed was that most of them were never the best salesperson in their organization. In fact, the majority of them had very little sales experience. They had enough to be credible in the marketplace and they had enough sales experience to know what it is like to face rejection and to get a big win.