Colleen’s Blog

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.

A good sales organization centres around a good sales coach. In fact, coaching is what drives top performance in sales teams. More importantly, sales teams with coaches—who are being coached on average 3 hours per rep or month—see anywhere from 15 to 30 percent performance improvement compared to the organizations that don't have a coaching program.

We're approaching the halfway mark of the year (already!), will you hit your goals? At the beginning of the year, most of us had goals set for the next 12 months. There was a certain excitement in the air and the feeling of "anything is possible" in the minds of many sellers. However, flash forward a few months later, and many of those goals have already fallen by the wayside.

When it comes to buyer behaviour trends in the marketplace, I'm noticing—with research and my clients—that more and more buyers are utilizing social media to help them make decisions about products and services that they're buying in the B2B marketplace. I've seen some studies that illustrate that it's up to 85%. However, whether it's 50%, 60%, or 85% in your marketplace, you cannot ignore this trend.

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.

The number one question I get from sales leaders: how do I get my sellers to ask for more referrals? Sellers are notoriously bad at asking for referrals in a business to business environment because it makes them sound needy, helpless, or desperate. How do we rectify this fearful mindset?