Colleen’s Blog

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to sell to everyone that comes into your pipeline. I know, it’s intuitive as a salesperson to sell as much as possible, but effective salespeople know how to pick and choose which prospects to sell to. They know the good from the bad. The reality is, not every prospect is an ideal candidate for your product or service. The sooner you learn this important lesson, the sooner you can focus on the prospects that are ideal candidates for you to work with. By selling to anyone and everyone, you are setting yourself up for huge customer service problems in the future. ← Click To Tweet

After a week of touring ancient cities on the Rhine including visiting a good selection of castles, fortresses and churches, I discovered that I most enjoy them! They offer a complete glimpse into the way entire towns lived, the ways families came together and went about their daily lives, and how they protected their lives. One thing that came as a surprise was this: All castles have a single weak spot. There was only one penetrable opening in the castle that put the inhabitants at risk of enemy takeover. And, it’s the one spot with direct and open access to the ground below. Any guesses where it is? The toilet! Because the toilet was a simple hole in the floor with direct access to the outside, usually on the second floor and located over a hill, it created a vulnerable spot for the fortress. For this reason, the toilet only locked on the outside so you could escape quickly and lock the enemy out, and, was located in a highly trafficked room such as a dining hall so that if the enemy came up, there were lots of knights waiting to attack them! As I was learning about all the attempted attacks on the Marksburg Castle (the most well-restored castle on the Rhine), I got to thinking about sales teams. It struck me that all sales teams have a weak spot too. And while all teams might not have the exact same weak spot, identifying yours is the key to accelerating performance. In my experience, a sales team weak spot falls into 1 of 5 categories:

You’ve probably achieved a degree of success by doing the right things from the comfort of your office. If you’re taking the right steps directly from your office, well done! The good news is, if you’re maximizing your efficiency during your work hours in the office, you can expect to achieve great sales results! The better news? You can actually achieve even greater success by periodically stepping outside the boundaries of your office. Most salespeople quite literally think inside the box. That is - they do 100% of their work and achieve 100% of their results directly from their office. However, the most successful salespeople have learned how to think and act outside the box. In other words, they know how to leverage opportunities outside of their office to create accelerated sales results. Here are two tips to help you get out of the office and create new opportunities for yourself: