Colleen’s Blog

Are you truly catering to your customers? It’s one thing to provide a great product or service, but unfortunately, that’s where the experience stops for many people. Sales is all about truly understanding your clients’ needs and issues. Their experience with you should not end immediately after their signature is on paper. The way I see it, all customers want the same 13 things from you. That’s right. Regardless of the industry you’re in, or the product you sell, customers all essentially buy and remain loyal for the same core reasons. <-- Click To Tweet Stay true to all of them and you will develop a loyal and profitable customer base who will refer you to everyone they know!

It's frustrating. When you see a sales rep struggling month after month, and missing target after target, it's enough to make any sales leader uneasy. The problem is most leaders handle poor performers the wrong way. There's a tendency to have "tough conversations" or attempt to punish them into higher performance. Some leaders even give poor performers the "cold shoulder" and allow a rep's professional performance to seep into their personal behavior towards them. These are all things that are extremely counterproductive and more often than not, contribute to more negativity and even worse performance. Luckily, there are strategies you can put into place to help improve their results. 

I travel for a living (it seems) and for the last two years I have been avoiding the US Connections area at Pearson airport like the plague. Why? To sum it up quickly, it's been a mess! Small cramped facilities, confusing steps that were not well communicated, multiple procedures that triplicated tasks, insufficient capacity for Global Entry, and machines that were constantly broken or out of order. Plus, mixing connecting and non connecting passengers meant the passenger loads were too high to process everyone in time to make flights. My last fight was delayed an hour simply because the system could not get everyone through security and customs on time. Not cool. Today, that all changed. The new procedures show excellent promise:

I spent the week with two teams of top performing sales professionals this week. Although I suspect that some of them will fall out of that position before too long. Here are my observations: