Colleen’s Blog

I'm currently working on a large project where I work closely with several sales managers. Unfortunately, I have been disappointed with their managerial qualities. This is because they don't practice coaching and exhibit leadership—skills that all of these sales managers are more than capable of displaying. However, instead, they make excuses, hang on to existing customers, and get engaged in customer service or delivery work—work that isn't their primary responsibility. As a result, their sales team suffers.

When I ask sales teams what's the number reason why their pipeline isn't more full—how come they're managing a pipeline so lean it's going to be impossible for them to hit their targets—they give me an excuse. They abdicate responsibility, claiming that their marketing department has not provided them with enough leads. You have to be responsible for your own pipeline.

I recently talked to a group of sales leaders. It was the last three days of their quarter and they told me, "Colleen, we have to admit: we are having a fire sale. We're doing everything we can right now, including deep discounts to push us over the end of the month because we are a bit behind and we want to finish the quarter on track."

I often get asked: what is considered a normal close rate and how do I improve it?

Today, I will be exploring how you can improve the metric of sales cycle length: how many days it takes to close a piece of business. If you can move that, for example, from 90 days to 80 days or 120 days to 90 days, you can dramatically improve your sales velocity.

It's important to remember that we create the gatekeepers—they're all in our own mind. If we create them, we can get rid of them.

I often get a number of questions from clients about sales productivity enhancements: how do we sell more in less time, how do we bring our sales ratios down, how do we bring our closing speed down, or how do we bring our average order size up? There is one way to achieve all of those: through engagement.

A good sales organization centres around a good sales coach. In fact, coaching is what drives top performance in sales teams. More importantly, sales teams with coaches—who are being coached on average 3 hours per rep or month—see anywhere from 15 to 30 percent performance improvement compared to the organizations that don't have a coaching program.

Today, I will highlight what I've discovered about making training work—making it work in a way that you get and a way that will yield the highest ROI from your sales training dollar.

The number one question I get from sales leaders: how do I get my sellers to ask for more referrals? Sellers are notoriously bad at asking for referrals in a business to business environment because it makes them sound needy, helpless, or desperate. How do we rectify this fearful mindset?