Colleen’s Blog

Generating leads is great, but if none of those people are actually going to end up working with you, or do but turn out to be an entirely wrong fit for your business...what good is it doing?

Like many sellers, you’re wrapping up your fiscal year soon, so it’s time to close-out your year strong. Now, more than ever, it’s time to get real about your sales: knowing what you can realistically close now, as well as what to target in the coming year. Why? Because too often, we engage in avoidance behavior: putting-off problems until later, when they need to be tackled now. That’s at the root of a lot of mistakes I see in the marketplace today, and is a key hindrance to sales acceleration. Stop kicking that can down the road. You need to plan and execute each of these steps to get real in 2018:

This year has been the year of international travel for me. As I write this I'm on my last overseas trip for the year, kicking off a new project in France. As a sales expert, I watch interactions everywhere, and it's fascinating to see how different cultures interact personally and professionally. Here are some interesting observations:

Today, I really want to focus on sales leaders for this strategy. Specifically, any sales leader who has a team who needs to set targets or an individual who sets their own targets such as a business owner or an individual contributor.

It's fall, which always means a lot of travel for me, and this year is no exception. We threw in a vacation for good measure, and as I'm writing this post I am sitting in my first ever southern hemisphere destination, Sao Paulo. As always, travel is a great way to observe the buying and selling behaviors of the global community. Here are 4 lessons I have learned in the last 12 weeks:

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.