Colleen’s Blog

I want to share with you a concerning trend involving your prospects’ trust and what you can do to fix it.  We are indeed seeing issues involving trust from buyers right now. Who can blame them? It's an incredibly volatile marketplace and it's going to continue this way for some time. However, it’s important for us to recognize that buyers currently lack trust not necessarily because they lack trust in you, but because they lack trust in themselves.

How much attention are you paying to the way your sales team is engaging with their buyers? Why, you ask? Well, there's a big difference between the way mediocre or poor performers interact with their buyers compared to how top performers do. Average salespeople view and regard their prospects as one of two things: 1. superior to them or 2. inferior to them. Let me explain.

“Buyers have changed and loyalty’s dead now. Customers don’t care about the relationship anymore!”  I’ve been hearing that whine a lot from sellers. Most recently, it was from a client of mine, saying: “I’ve been supplying my long-time customer with free donuts and baseball hats every month for the last 20 years and now they’ve suddenly moved to the competition!”

Helicoptering behaviour: it isn't just limited to parenting. It's a real problem in the workplace today. And it's especially damaging in sales organizations.

As you may know, I like to keep up on the state of the current buyer: what's going through their minds, how are they behaving, and how are they rewarding or not rewarding sellers like us?

Getting sales calls returned is almost always on a salesperson's mind.

A bad apple spoils the bunch? Not so fast. I often hear one of these familiar whines: "Colleen, it's different around here..." "Colleen, what you need to know about our market is..." "Colleen, it's unique here..."

You've probably heard some of the buzz around leading with fear.

Sales leaders spend a great deal of time talking to managers on how to be effective coaches. However, it’s important for salespeople to realize that they need to be coachable as well.

Years ago, I was at a large gathering of CEOs: all sharp thinkers who want to see their companies grow. While I'd been invited to address their forum to talk about the sales process, what many of them really wanted to ask me about afterwards was where they fit in that process. Specifically: do CEOs need to get involved in selling, and if so, when?