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.

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.

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.

I've been working a lot with sales managers over the past few months and interestingly, we've been talking about recruiting, retention, motivation, and top performance. They all have one thing in common.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of research with our clients and a lot of reading on sales turnover rates because it's impossible to create a non-stop sales boom if you have high turnover.

Want to know two things that never go together when it comes to salespeople? Low confidence and high sales results. Seriously, have you ever seen a sales rep who sulks in the corner all day, talks about how tough it is to make sales, lacks overall self-esteem but simultaneously still manages to be the top performer in the company? Suffice to say that's a rhetorical question. It simply doesn't happen. Methods and strategies are great, but are you focusing enough on your sales team's confidence level?

Recently, I was on a sales call and the sales directors that I talked to had some interesting things to say that I want to share with you.

Today, I have a challenge for you. I want you to throw out all notions that all micromanaging is bad because in fact, micromanaging your sales team can be a good thing.

Today, I want to talk to you about a problem that I see many people in our industry make and that is believing that giving your customers more choice is the best thing you can do for them.