Colleen’s Blog

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.

Workshops and learning events can be the least effective—and for some, even the worst—places for your salespeople to get the training they need. You heard that right. Now, let me explain.

   A few months ago, I was privileged to be invited to a seminar hosted by Gartner featuring a small group of top level thought leaders in sales. There were about six of us around the table and we got a preview of Gartner's research that they were rolling out at their sales summit later in the year. We assessed and discussed the research—in particular, how it applied to our clients.

We recently experienced great success with our sales training programs. The customers involved received up to 200 to 400 percent return on investment just a few short months after the program was implemented—not after a year or multiple years, but indeed just a few short months.

When we're making a sale, we're asking someone to make a change—a change in business, strategy, software, people, or products. However, more importantly, change is difficult. If you start thinking about selling as managing a change management process, it really helps you to speed up sales and set yourself apart from the competition. Why? Because your buyers, indeed, don't like change. They're scared of change and making the wrong decision.

It's the thing you always do because it worked before. Much like the delivery person whose route over the years has consisted of taking as many right turns as possible to save time, sales leaders have a tendency of relying on time-honoured habits in the execution of their work.

Years ago, I had a client based in Northern Europe and they were a ships services company. Their sales VP told me, "Colleen, we have a long and proud history of losing all the RFPs where we have the incumbent relationship." I had to think twice for a second and did not know what he was talking about.