Colleen’s Blog

It's fall, which always means a lot of travel for me, and this year is no exception. We threw in a vacation for good measure, and as I'm writing this post I am sitting in my first ever southern hemisphere destination, Sao Paulo. As always, travel is a great way to observe the buying and selling behaviors of the global community. Here are 4 lessons I have learned in the last 12 weeks:

Do more: it’s an expectation imposed on sales reps constantly. Every year, quotas go up, KPIs get revised and the number of people that need to be served keeps climbing. And…it’s happening in a selling market that’s changing faster than ever, and putting a lot of pressure on sellers. When people are pressed, many are prone to make bad decisions: going overboard with sales work, often in a scattershot way, hoping something—anything—will hit their target.

This week, I had the pleasure of addressing 400 top Financial Services professionals at a national sales conference in Las Vegas. In fact, the image embedded to this blog post is the "backstage" view I had before the audience starting piling into the room. Here are the top 10 points from my keynote, they're the strategies that work today:

Are you considering raising your prices? Many salespeople look at raising prices with a grain of salt, a double-edged sword if you will. On one hand, raising prices means more earnings and greater profits. On the other hand, it could upset or scare away your current client base.

If you're in sales, you know the age-old mentality towards marketing. They're often looked at as the "bad guys." They're not the enemy.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Cold calling is nothing more than desperation selling.

Your sales team needs to know how to pivot. Anyone can memorize a sales script - but it's an essential skill for salespeople to be able to handle all elements of a real-world conversation, including those dreaded objections. An unexpected answer, question or concern is no grounds for a sales rep to lose their composure. Their expectation should be to carry right on the with the conversation and pivot with another question. No, a "deer in the headlights" look does not bode well with instilling confidence in a buyer's mind.