Colleen’s Blog

   Here’s an idea for all of you planning your sales kickoffs or big sales meetings with all of your team present: rather than just having a number of outsiders come in and talk about their motivational, sales, or consulting principles, have somebody come in and interview your top performers.

Workshops and learning events can be the least effective—and for some, even the worst—places for your salespeople to get the training they need. You heard that right. Now, let me explain.

   We've seen a lot of very high performing sales managers that come through our program. And one thing I noticed was that most of them were never the best salesperson in their organization. In fact, the majority of them had very little sales experience. They had enough to be credible in the marketplace and they had enough sales experience to know what it is like to face rejection and to get a big win.

When we're making a sale, we're asking someone to make a change—a change in business, strategy, software, people, or products. However, more importantly, change is difficult. If you start thinking about selling as managing a change management process, it really helps you to speed up sales and set yourself apart from the competition. Why? Because your buyers, indeed, don't like change. They're scared of change and making the wrong decision.

It's the thing you always do because it worked before. Much like the delivery person whose route over the years has consisted of taking as many right turns as possible to save time, sales leaders have a tendency of relying on time-honoured habits in the execution of their work.

Whether it's a prospect or a client you've been doing business with for years, you need to over-communicate, not under-communicate. Far too many sellers believe that no news is good news. If they have a problem they are trying to resolve and have not resolved it, they just won't call their customers. This stems from the fear that the customer will either not like their progress or response. Thus, these sellers hide and under-communicate.

Years ago, I had a client based in Northern Europe and they were a ships services company. Their sales VP told me, "Colleen, we have a long and proud history of losing all the RFPs where we have the incumbent relationship." I had to think twice for a second and did not know what he was talking about.

I've stopped more than one CEO in their tracks when I've heard them utter this phrase: "I need you to fix a sales problem I have." Doing the fixing is not what I do.

I was recently with a group of sales leaders and one of them admitted that he had sales reps who didn't use CRM. And this sales leader was from a top-performing company with around 40-50 reps who are consistently over their targets both from a volume and margin perspective. While it was commendable that he was willing to admit that his sales reps had CRM deficiencies, it's a shame that those salespeople were not using a tool that would make them much more effective.

It's impossible to create a non-stop sales boom in your organization with a high turnover rate. Have you thought about how to reduce it on your sales team?