Colleen’s Blog

When professionals in virtually every industry think about "compensation" - especially when it comes to structuring compensation plans, rarely is anything but a dollar sign considered. Yet, there's another powerful way to provide commissions to your sales team, and you're likely overlooking it or underestimating its power and value.

Response rates are critical in sales. After all, if you can't get a buyer to respond to a call or an email...you can't start a relationship let alone close a sale. Smart sellers know that email marketing to a warm list of buyers is a profitable way to both keep in touch with your current customers as well as attracting new buyers. That being said, you must pay attention to a few rules to ensuring your emails are responded to positively.

As a sales leader, you need to know how to be an effective coach. LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and even Oprah Winfrey have coaches - because they understand the power of an outside perspective to help them master their own games. So, regardless of how well a salesperson is excelling or exceeding their targets, you should never just "let them be" and hope that they continue to grow, develop, and produce results. The problem is, many sales leaders don't understand the difference between coaching, managing and simply shouting out directives and commands. Don't be fooled, the latter is NOT coaching.

What if I told you that you may be standing on a sales gold mine and not even know it? There are actually countless organizations who will miss their sales targets this year, without realizing that if they took advantage of this gold mine, they could not only make up lost ground, but completely exceed the results they hope to create this year. Don't worry about grabbing your shovels, no physical labor is necessary to tap into and grab the gold that's already waiting for you. Wondering what I'm talking about? Enough suspense!

Home fitness is all the craze these days. You know, those big, bulky machines that supposedly deliver amazing results or certain 90 day programs that make you fit and healthy? Don't worry, I'm not about to bash anything that can increase your fitness, health and overall well-being. The fitness machines and programs are not my issue. In fact, if you eat right, work hard and stay committed, you probably will get into great shape. My issue is with the people who buy these machines/programs, and then leave them to collect dust. You can have greatest fitness program or gym pass in the world, but if you don't use it, the results won't come. 

My business mentor and good friend, Alan Weiss and I can agree on one thing. It doesn’t matter that you know your good, it matters that you know why you are good in the first place. Top sales people and sales managers don’t look at this closely enough. I believe that you only get better by building on your strengths and in order to be successful this year, you should understand what those strengths are. One of the hardest things that we can do as sales leaders is become conscious of what the top sales performers do subconsciously. Many top sales people will say, "I don’t know, I just go out there and win the deal." Well, we need to become conscious of all of those steps that either we do along the way as top sales performers and managers. So ask yourself, or your top sales reps these questions:

This is one of the few times in a year where professionals across virtually every industry can look at their goals with hope and excitement. Unfortunately, for the bulk of goal setters out there, this excitement lasts usually until the end of the first quarter (often much sooner) - at which point they realize they've burned through 25% of the year with little progress on those new year's plans that offered so much to look forward to a couple months prior. Don't let this be you! Regardless of how 2016 ended, it's now behind us. Your full focus should be on making 2017 your best year yet, and the best time to take action is immediately. Let me help you by highlighting some simple disciplines that will send your sales skyrocketing this year.

Do you turn your computer on each morning only to find a mountain of unread emails that need your attention? Email overload is an epidemic in the workplace. Most salespeople that we poll tell us that they spend up to 40% of their day just managing email correspondence between clients and internal partners. If this sounds about right for you as well, let me put things into perspective. If you continue this trend throughout 2017 and work 5 days a week, you will spend 104 days next year in your email inbox. If you manage a sales team of 10 people, that is almost 3 years of collective time in 2017 between your sales team that will be spent in an email inbox and not actually selling. If you manage a sales team of 100 people, well...you can do the math.

The amazing Jill Konrath has done it again. Her new book More Sales, Less Time has been released today and like all her books. This one is bound to be a best seller. Jill and I have shared the stage many times and I always value her wisdom on what it takes to be successful selling now.