Colleen’s Blog

The other day, I got a call from one of my long-term coaching clients. He was excited because he had just blown away his sales numbers. He had a 7 million dollar quota and he closed 10 million, but he was also furious about being reprimanded for not putting in as many miles as the other field sales reps.

Have you ever taken a serious look at your pipeline? There are likely a few extremely valuable clues it's trying to tell you! Let's take a deeper look at this.

For the last few videos, I've been talking about client retention and expanding your network within your client accounts. From this, the response I always get is, "Colleen, I don't want to be behind my client's back because they might get angry with me and my relationship with them would erode."

If I was running your sales team and there had to be one thing that I would insist on, it would be this non-negotiable, mandatory behavior from all salespeople.

At this time of year, the weather is warm (for the most part!), sellers are anxiously awaiting their vacation, and they also seem to buy into the idea that making sales is next to impossible.

The best behavior that you can exhibit in order to retain the vast majority of your customers is a healthy sense of paranoia.

Today, I'm decreeing a ban on corporate marketing materials for salespeople. I want to ban salespeople from using them, ban marketing teams from producing them, and maybe even ban the entire industry. Why?

Sales leaders ask me all the time about how to make their sales team take accountability, or hold them accountable, for the set goals. I have to remind them that it's very hard for anyone to want to be accountable for someone else's goals.

I recently got back from a vacation in Japan and from that experience, I started to think about why I love going there in the first place. What draws me there? What sales lessons can we learn?