Colleen’s Blog

I've been working with a business owner who's been struggling with the concept of accountability because she just doesn't want to fire people for not hitting their goals or penalize them for not doing the things she wants them to do.

The other day, I got a call from one of my long-term coaching clients. He was excited because he had just blown away his sales numbers. He had a 7 million dollar quota and he closed 10 million, but he was also furious about being reprimanded for not putting in as many miles as the other field sales reps.

For the last few videos, I've been talking about client retention and expanding your network within your client accounts. From this, the response I always get is, "Colleen, I don't want to be behind my client's back because they might get angry with me and my relationship with them would erode."

If I was running your sales team and there had to be one thing that I would insist on, it would be this non-negotiable, mandatory behavior from all salespeople.

The best behavior that you can exhibit in order to retain the vast majority of your customers is a healthy sense of paranoia.

Today, I'm decreeing a ban on corporate marketing materials for salespeople. I want to ban salespeople from using them, ban marketing teams from producing them, and maybe even ban the entire industry. Why?

Sales leaders ask me all the time about how to make their sales team take accountability, or hold them accountable, for the set goals. I have to remind them that it's very hard for anyone to want to be accountable for someone else's goals.

I recently got back from a vacation in Japan and from that experience, I started to think about why I love going there in the first place. What draws me there? What sales lessons can we learn?

I've always been a fan of coaching sales reps on a given day. I love it when you have a consistent date and time where you coach your entire team one-on-one. However, managers often come up to me and say, "Colleen, it's exhausting." While it can be exhausting, it can also be exhilarating.

I get called in a lot to help companies grow their sales and whenever a company is not growing the way they want or not hitting their sales targets, I take a look at the pipeline because I know it is the #1 reason why people aren't growing their sales.