Colleen’s Blog

Not all sellers who are behind on their sales targets should be terminated. But, any seller who is behind and uncoachable should be terminated immediately.

I get called in a lot when organizations are struggling to hit their sales targets. Generally, the first thing I'll do is look at their pipeline. Why?

Let's face it, your competition inevitably comes up every so often while you speak with prospects and clients. You need to know how to talk about the competition.

I have a question for you. Do you really know where your revenue comes from? Most businesses can probably answer that question pretty quickly. It's obvious, right? Not so fast.

Stop hanging on to poor sales performers! It's becoming increasingly apparent to me that sales leaders hesitate far too much when it comes to getting rid of their dead weight. In fact, this is a common element I come across in many dysfunctional sales teams I observe. Wondering if, perhaps, this is something you might be guilty of yourself?

Slow markets don't have to mean slow sales.

I was recently talking to a sales rep who told me he had not taken a vacation in 5 years. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he saw it as a badge of honor and was bragging about it. I stopped him and told him that it's not a badge of honor to never take some time off. In fact, it's a sign that you are highly inefficient if you feel you can't go away for a few days—let alone a few weeks—and have everything fall out from underneath you. It's also a sign of a really unhealthy ego if you think that your business and your client will fall apart if you go away. You believe that you are the only thing that is holding the territory together. Stop it.

It's impossible to create a non-stop sales boom in your organization with a high turnover rate. Have you thought about how to reduce it on your sales team?

Far too many sales teams underperform because they have underperforming sales reps in the team. These sales reps need to be replaced. Additionally, another reason for a sales team's poor performance is that one of the top sales performers left, resulting in a drastic loss. Both of those are issues that sales leaders have to address on a proactive basis.

You may have noticed this interesting trend... Lost deals tend to be the same ones that stagnate during the proposal phase.