Colleen’s Blog

This year has been the year of international travel for me. As I write this I'm on my last overseas trip for the year, kicking off a new project in France. As a sales expert, I watch interactions everywhere, and it's fascinating to see how different cultures interact personally and professionally. Here are some interesting observations:

Today, I really want to focus on sales leaders for this strategy. Specifically, any sales leader who has a team who needs to set targets or an individual who sets their own targets such as a business owner or an individual contributor.

There has been much debate on my LinkedIn article regarding cold calling. I've discussed it in-depth this year especially, as in 2017 and beyond there are simply more effective prospecting methods available today.

It's fall, which always means a lot of travel for me, and this year is no exception. We threw in a vacation for good measure, and as I'm writing this post I am sitting in my first ever southern hemisphere destination, Sao Paulo. As always, travel is a great way to observe the buying and selling behaviors of the global community. Here are 4 lessons I have learned in the last 12 weeks:

I've been spending a lot of time talking about reducing labor in sales. In fact, we had a blog post about it a few weeks ago as well as a Facebook Live video.

Do more: it’s an expectation imposed on sales reps constantly. Every year, quotas go up, KPIs get revised and the number of people that need to be served keeps climbing. And…it’s happening in a selling market that’s changing faster than ever, and putting a lot of pressure on sellers. When people are pressed, many are prone to make bad decisions: going overboard with sales work, often in a scattershot way, hoping something—anything—will hit their target.