Colleen’s Blog

So far in this series on sales velocity—which is all about understanding how fast you and your team are making sales and earning revenue—we've talked about what you need to do more of. More opportunities earned, for instance, means a bigger, healthier sales pipeline for your business.

Today, I will be exploring how you can improve the metric of sales cycle length: how many days it takes to close a piece of business. If you can move that, for example, from 90 days to 80 days or 120 days to 90 days, you can dramatically improve your sales velocity.

Want to know the very best way to keep the majority of your customer base? Develop a healthy sense of paranoia. That's right, paranoia.

In this series, we're looking at sales velocity: measuring how fast your team is making sales and earning revenue. The reason it's one of your most important metrics—and predictors—of success is that it gives you the flexibility to make adjustments in four key areas: opportunities, deal size, win/lose rate and sales cycle time.

How can you ensure that you’re hiring the right people to join your sales team? Many sales leaders have been asking me how to hire new sales reps and build a profitable team. I often suggest taking a step back before conducting interviews and hiring a new team member. There are a few things you need to do before you proceed with interviews in order to ensure that you hire the right person and create the best team possible.

It's important to remember that we create the gatekeepers—they're all in our own mind. If we create them, we can get rid of them.

I often get a number of questions from clients about sales productivity enhancements: how do we sell more in less time, how do we bring our sales ratios down, how do we bring our closing speed down, or how do we bring our average order size up? There is one way to achieve all of those: through engagement.

A good sales organization centres around a good sales coach. In fact, coaching is what drives top performance in sales teams. More importantly, sales teams with coaches—who are being coached on average 3 hours per rep or month—see anywhere from 15 to 30 percent performance improvement compared to the organizations that don't have a coaching program.

We're approaching the halfway mark of the year (already!), will you hit your goals? At the beginning of the year, most of us had goals set for the next 12 months. There was a certain excitement in the air and the feeling of "anything is possible" in the minds of many sellers. However, flash forward a few months later, and many of those goals have already fallen by the wayside.