Colleen’s Blog

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.

You can sometimes learn a lot from your dog. I have a relatively new puppy at home and there's one thing I noticed about her that all salespeople can learn from: you've got to ask for what you want. Indeed, the biggest reason salespeople don't get the sale is because they never ask for it.

Sales velocity is incredibly important because it is the measure of revenue that you bring in per person each day. It's a great indication of the future success or the gap you are creating based on a variety of key measures.

How can you ensure that you’re hiring the right people to join your sales team? Many sales leaders have been asking me how to hire new sales reps and build a profitable team. I often suggest taking a step back before conducting interviews and hiring a new team member. There are a few things you need to do before you proceed with interviews in order to ensure that you hire the right person and create the best team possible.

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.

When it comes to buyer behaviour trends in the marketplace, I'm noticing—with research and my clients—that more and more buyers are utilizing social media to help them make decisions about products and services that they're buying in the B2B marketplace. I've seen some studies that illustrate that it's up to 85%. However, whether it's 50%, 60%, or 85% in your marketplace, you cannot ignore this trend.

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?