Colleen’s Blog

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.

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.

One thing that I know all top performers have in common is that they're really good at self-assessing such as asking questions on what they did well on.

I have been thinking a lot about pipeline building recently, specifically, a sales rep requirement to not only look short term at the deals within their pipeline that they should be closing, but also to look into the future in order to build the pipeline that they need to close business in the first place.

In my community, there is a very big named sales trainer who came out during a presentation recently and said, "Your job as a sales rep is to push your value proposition hard and often enough until the customer either buys or walks."

A few weeks ago, I had a rousing discussion on LinkedIn about the downside of pushing too hard as I recently did a Facebook Live video about pushing hard until the end of the year.

A couple of weeks ago, the Engage Selling Facebook page hosted one of my Facebook Lives. During that video, we talked about pushing through to the end of the year and making sure that you either hit your goals or exceed past them.

Last week, we started talking about trends in the marketplace. Another trend that we are spotting inside corporations is that the buying process is becoming more collaborative than ever.

I think it's fair to say that our buyers are busier than ever before because we're in a virtual employment situation. In fact, studies are showing that this is the first time in our lifetime that we've had more job openings than people looking for work.

I get called in a lot to help companies grow their sales and whenever a company is not growing the way they want or not hitting their sales targets, I take a look at the pipeline because I know it is the #1 reason why people aren't growing their sales.