Colleen’s Blog

Over the last few years, I have been working with a number of companies who have all formalized and institutionalized this process of demonstrating tangible return on investment with their sales teams by building return on investment calculators.

I often get asked: what is considered a normal close rate and how do I improve it?

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.

Take the time to analyze how you respond to things, both online and offline. Recently, I posted a new video on cold calling on LinkedIn.

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.

Micromanaging often gets a bad wrap in the professional world. But, could it actually be a good thing? Look, the term micromanage can have different meanings to different people.

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.