Colleen Francis: The New Normal of Sales

About Colleen Francis: Colleen Francis is an award-winning speaker, consultant and bestselling author who helps leading businesses achieve dramatic increases in their sales results. A successful sales leader for over 20 years, she understands the particular challenges of selling in today’s competitive market, and that business leaders can no longer rely on approaches to sales based on techniques from decades ago—or even last year. Colleen doesn’t believe in the old-school mentality that only 20% of a sales team hit their sales targets. She says, that in today’s modern selling era, we should expect 100% of the sales teams to hit 100% of the quota. Colleen works with business and sales leaders to synergize the sales DNA of the organization to seize market opportunities. Whether designing a strategy to target a new market or working with a team to improve its productivity, Colleen's results have attracted clients such as Merck, Abbott, Merrill Lynch, Royal Bank, Dow, Adecco, Trend Micro, NCR, Chevron, and thousands of other global organizations. Her latest book, Right on the Money: New Principles for Bold Growth, provides readers with a proven, realistic game plan to redraw maps for sales and marketing in a topsy-turvy world. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Colleen.

In this episode, Nancy and Colleen discuss the following:

• Challenges of selling in today's market
• Importance of organizational structure and flexibility in sales processes
• Effective sales questions: Open-ended and closed-ended questions 
• The evolution of selling practices due to technological advancements
• The impact of COVID-19 on selling practices
• The evolution of prospecting methods and the importance of utilizing different marketing channels to reach prospects

Key Takeaways: 

• We need to be open, we have to be easy to buy from and talk to.
• it's not a question of whether you do virtual or whether you like it, it's how your clients are operating and how can you best have a conversation with them in the mode of communication that they want.
• Prospecting is much easier as well than it ever used to be because we have so many other sources.

"I think one of the biggest challenges that we are facing in today's market is this massive demographic shift and lack of workers. So, reductions in workforce because there aren't people, we just aren't as populous as we used to be, have two or three major effects on us as salespeople. One, it's going to force companies to keep increasing their quotas because they're going to have to grow and they're not going to be able to find salespeople. So, we're going to have to learn how to be more effective at what we do by combining, you know, virtual and in-person and all those kinds of things. Two, it puts pressure on our buyers because there are fewer of them, right? And they're doing more work. They're doing, they have more jobs. And so we're gonna continue in this buying environment where it's risky, people are scared to make decisions, they lack experience making decisions, they have 18 other jobs to do so they don't have time to make decisions. So, I think that those, that one challenge in the marketplace is going to drive a bunch of challenges that we have as salespeople." – COLLEEN

"So critical mass influence in my belief in selling is that we build the best client relationships when we have a very broad reach, high, low, you know, East-West, right? Critical mass influence is about building that so that people, so you're easy to find, you're easy to buy from, and everybody feels like they know you. So, it's about using multiple types of media. So, whether it be social media, if we want to call it that, LinkedIn, your email, blogs, all those kinds of media, and reaching out to everybody that is related or potentially related to your customer. You know, Nancy, years ago, there was an ad on TV, if you remember, and I think it was for Clarell, and it was that I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on and so on and so on. Yeah, right. This is sort of the modern version of that because people are so important to the sales process, including people you will never meet. And so we have to get to our buyers, our influencers, our stakeholders. We must figure out a way to get our message to the people whom our buyers, influencers, and stakeholders might be listening to onto the platforms that they might be reading. And we also need to get everyone in our organization to do that. It's not just a sales responsibility. It's a marketing responsibility. It's customer service, its operations, it's finance.” – COLLEEN

“First of all, we have to have a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions because that's how a conversation flows naturally. I encourage salespeople to not be afraid of a closed-ended question because it will help you direct the conversation one way or the other depending on where it needs to be. We also must be comfortable being curious, asking the question, why? Why do you feel that way? Why are you saying that? What do you mean? Those kinds of questions so that we can get people talking about the real reason why they're making those statements. The third thing is, from a tactical perspective, we have to ask short questions. So, I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but salespeople will often fall into the habit, and I think this is a conversation breaker, where they ask the question, explain the question, answer the question, and then ask a whole entirely different question without taking a breath. And the poor prospect is, it is, it's terrible. Multi-pronged questions, I call them. Whereas if you ask a short question, you're going to get a long answer. And so, I think that's another way to ask effective questions." – COLLEEN

Connect with Colleen Francis:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleenfrancis/
• Engage Selling Solutions: https://www.engageselling.com/

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