Colleen’s Blog

One of my clients recently told me that they wanted to divide their sales team up into “hunters” and “farmers.” It's not an ideal structure in my mind, but they wanted to go through with this and believed it was best for their business. Thus, I tried to find ways to make it work for them. In particular, here’s what I discovered. 

This week, I want to examine the ideal client. Because, far too often, we have a superficial picture of what the ideal client looks like.

I want to share with you a concerning trend involving your prospects’ trust and what you can do to fix it.  We are indeed seeing issues involving trust from buyers right now. Who can blame them? It's an incredibly volatile marketplace and it's going to continue this way for some time. However, it’s important for us to recognize that buyers currently lack trust not necessarily because they lack trust in you, but because they lack trust in themselves.

You've probably heard some of the buzz around leading with fear.

“Follow every step of this bulletproof routine every day and you’re sure to become a high performer in sales.” That, my friend, is terrible advice. And yet that kind of guidance keeps getting spread around as though it’s the plain truth—when, in fact, it’s just…well…bull-sourced fertilizer!

I was working with a group of high performing salespeople years ago—well before the pandemic. And one of them was whining and complaining to me about how he was losing all of his business to the competition. The competition was crushing him on price and all of his customers were price-sensitive. Everything was coming down to pennies on the dollar, resulting in him losing business.

It can feel like a big, scary problem when your customer starts demanding you renegotiate terms and prices on an existing agreement you have with them. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. As a sales leader, there are steps you must take to ensure you remain in the driver’s seat in challenging situations like this—no matter what.

This week, I want to explore sales goals. I know we all have them. Our companies set them for us, our leaders set them for us, and perhaps you set some for yourself.

Your greatest sales success will come when you stop using seller-focused pipelines in your sales process. As I explained in the previous article in this series, that old approach—while still common—is mired in assumptions that simply aren’t true anymore.

Imagine you're preparing a delicious meal and you're short on olive oil. Would you add vinegar to make that oil go further? Of course not! Those are complementary ingredients, not interchangeable ones. You can shake them together but soon they'll separate.