Colleen’s Blog

In a previous video, we talked about the concept of learning by doing instead of learning through a training workshop or a facilitated training event. I was recently at an extended leadership team meeting for one of my best clients and he had all of his sales managers there. We introduced a quick concept to them around proper account planning and management.

Last week, we talked about persistence and I walked you through a call and email plan that’s designed to get somebody on the phone. There’s one other element of persistence that’s really important as you’re following up with an account and that is to be persistent with multiple people.

I’m a big fan of using your best to mentor the rest. One of the other things that I’m a huge fan of is learning by doing. So, what exactly does this mean and how can you harness its power in your organization?

Recently, I was pulled aside at a sales meeting by a couple of sales reps who said, “This is all great, Colleen, but my manager won’t coach us.  He won’t take the time to help us develop our skills. What should I do?  I mean I can’t get better because I can’t be coached.”

A few weeks ago, I was at a client sales management meeting and we were discussing Account Management because many were concerned that they were starting to lose some of their accounts.  There was a lot of resistance from the sales managers that said their teams won’t do account plans because they don’t want to go to the rigor of documenting what they’re going to do as clients are often unpredictable.

Last year, I was interviewed by Maclean's Magazine. They asked me what specific courses a student needed to take in order to get a good sales education coming out of university and going into the workplace.

One thing that I've noticed recently is that sellers aren’t always good at learning how to pivot. During the qualification stage, we get thrown for a loop sometimes. A prospect or a buyer answers in a way that we weren't expecting, yet we need to stay on track and pivot with another question.

Over the past 12 months, I have done some deep analysis of the sales pipeline, specifically looking for points of leverage that we can create more success with, as well as looking for any problem points that need to be fixed. Here's what I learned.

Recently, I was working with a client on some planning for their sales team. Specifically, we were creating action plans for every sales team members so that they would know how many calls, emails, meetings they need to take in a given day, week, month or year in order for them to hit their goal.

It’s really common for people to set goals. In sales, if you don’t set goals yourself, you'll probably have someone setting them for you anyways.