Colleen’s Blog

Sales is an interesting game. You never know when the most (seemingly) minor slip up can cost you. <-- Click To Tweet Because of this, I want to highlight a few common, and not-so-common mistakes so that you can build awareness around them. Take time to read though each item on the list and consider the consequences of making such an error in your own business. The more real it feels to you, the more likely you are to take it seriously and avoid making it in the future. If you've already made a mistake highlighted in the list, relearn the lessons associated with it. A mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn from it.

Following last month’s post of what to stop doing in 2016 today, we will focus on what you can do to accelerate sales in 2016: 1. Create an Account Management plan that includes a monthly touch point with all of your current customers.  This could be a phone call, business review, courtesy call, email, call from the customer service team, call from your manager, personal letter, thank you gift etc. The options are endless, and the results are always a boost in loyalty and sales. 2. Ask for internal referrals every week. Plan who you want to be referred to and ask a direct question such as “I would like to meet your VP of the western divisions. Can I tell him about work we have done together?"

After a much needed, quiet three weeks at home, I started to travel for myself and clients in late January. Here is the round-up of the good, the bad, and the unexplainable. Use the lessons to elevate your own customer experiences. They could make the difference between a loyal client and a lost one.

Let’s face it, sales as we know it has changed, from how to attract distracted buyers to how to nurture a long-term relationship when loyalty is diminishing almost as quickly as our attention span. Fortunately there is new information that can help us make sense of this evolution, which in turn can help educate our sales teams as to what they need to do differently. But have you considered that possibly our sales teams as we would define them have changed as well?

You only have a few seconds to make a positive first impression on someone. Let’s face it - within moments of meeting another person we have often already determined whether or not we want to work with them. Here are, what I believe to be, extremely simple steps to creating trust upon meeting someone new: 1) You must look and act like someone who is ready to do business. ← Click to Tweet 2) Then, it’s important to behave in such a way that generates positive feelings in the other person. Doing so will get that person to like you. 3) Once they like you, your continued behaviors will determine whether or not they will trust you. When they trust you, they will often do business with you. Sounds easy, right? Apparently not.