Colleen’s Blog

It used to be that buyers needed to know you first before they could trust your product. Today the reverse is true.

If you travel a lot with work—as I do—it exposes you to a much wider variety of ways that people experience the world around them. But travelling can also make us keen observers of human beings and how they do business with each other.

A short time ago in the B2B field, buyers were unaware of who sellers were until we called them.

There has been no greater impact on B2B sales in the last decade than the online consumer-buying process.

   Here’s an idea for all of you planning your sales kickoffs or big sales meetings with all of your team present: rather than just having a number of outsiders come in and talk about their motivational, sales, or consulting principles, have somebody come in and interview your top performers.

Workshops and learning events can be the least effective—and for some, even the worst—places for your salespeople to get the training they need. You heard that right. Now, let me explain.

It's the thing you always do because it worked before. Much like the delivery person whose route over the years has consisted of taking as many right turns as possible to save time, sales leaders have a tendency of relying on time-honoured habits in the execution of their work.

I've stopped more than one CEO in their tracks when I've heard them utter this phrase: "I need you to fix a sales problem I have." Doing the fixing is not what I do.

Sales velocity is a powerful metric that every sales leader must know inside out. While it measures how fast you're making sales and earning revenue, it gives you something even more valuable. You gain an understanding of the relationship between the four key activities that comprise your sales velocity: opportunities, deal size, closing rate and sales-cycle speed.

So far in this series—which looks at four adjustments you can make to improve your sales velocity — each activity has involved both a planning and execution stage.