Colleen’s Blog

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.

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.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Cold calling is nothing more than desperation selling.