Colleen’s Blog

It’s the worst question in sales and marketing today: How do I get better at cold calling? Spoiler alert: Cold calling is dead. Stop wasting your time with it.

Do more: it’s an expectation imposed on sales reps constantly. Every year, quotas go up, KPIs get revised and the number of people that need to be served keeps climbing. And…it’s happening in a selling market that’s changing faster than ever, and putting a lot of pressure on sellers. When people are pressed, many are prone to make bad decisions: going overboard with sales work, often in a scattershot way, hoping something—anything—will hit their target.

This week, I had the pleasure of addressing 400 top Financial Services professionals at a national sales conference in Las Vegas. In fact, the image embedded to this blog post is the "backstage" view I had before the audience starting piling into the room. Here are the top 10 points from my keynote, they're the strategies that work today:

I've had many opportunities recently to sit in during sales meetings and presentations, and I have to be honest. Awful is the really the only word that comes to mind.

If you're in sales, you know the age-old mentality towards marketing. They're often looked at as the "bad guys." They're not the enemy.