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/
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
- Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsales
- Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/
- Website:https://oneofakindsales.com
- Phone: 908-879-2911
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/
- Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Colleen Francis, founder, and president of Engage Selling Solutions, helping organizations develop and review sales strategies to ensure they meet their business objectives. Colleen is driven by a passion for sales and results. A successful sales leader for over 20 years, she understands the challenges of selling in today’s market. And in addition, Colleen is an award-winning writer, consultant, and bestselling author of popular sales books, including the recent Right on the Money a recognized thought leader in sales leadership. She is an inductee in the professional speaker Hall of Fame and has been named the number one sales influencer to follow by LinkedIn. Well, it’s a kudos to you Colleen and welcome to the show. I’m so happy to have you.
Colleen Francis: I am really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. [1:26]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. Well, why don’t we start by sharing what you believe are the challenges of selling in today’s market.
Colleen Francis: We only have 20 minutes, right? So, I think one of the biggest challenges that we are facing in today’s market is this massive demographic shift and an absence of, let’s just call it that, or lack of workers. And so why do I say this? So, reductions in workforce because there aren’t people, you know, 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 our 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’s 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 really going to drive a bunch of challenges that we have as salespeople. [3:04]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, talk about, I guess, what people have to do today to be successful in 24. Anything in particular that you would recommend that they start doing right away?
Colleen Francis: Yeah, so I think that they really need to be, well, they need to first be really easy to buy from, right? Easy to find, easy to buy from. I wrote in Right on the Money, I wrote that we’re in this selling environment where it’s sort of wait, hurry up. And it’s because buyers are spending a lot of time talking to others, researching on their own, trying to understand the lay of the land before they reach out to suppliers. And we know that Gartner tells us that 75% of all new sales are made, they’re started when the buyer actually does online research. So we have to be easy to find so that they know where we are. And we have to be really easy to buy from and talk to. We also need to be open. [4:09]
Nancy Calabrese: Wait a minute. What do you mean by easy to buy from?
Colleen Francis: It’s a good question. So, I think it’s two things. I think it’s the organizational structure, right? We can’t be cumbersome in terms of having contract hoops that people must run through and 12 legal processes and not be flexible, right? I think we must be open and willing to have conversations with people in multiple sources of media. So, it’s not just a phone call. It might have to be an email conversation or a LinkedIn conversation to start. I think we must also have organizations who are willing to work as a team. So, what we’re seeing is effective right now is where we have a group of stakeholders or buyers inside an organization and they’re coordinating their sales conversations with a group of sellers, managers, leaders, experts inside the selling organization. Of course, the salesperson is orchestrating all of that, so it adds a layer of complexity. But when we have these multiple contact points or multiple conversations going on, we have a much wider understanding of the value we bring. We have more stakeholders involved. They start trusting us more as an organization and its going to speed the sale forward. [5:34]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. Why do you say, and I’ve read this, that you say best practices are dead? Why is that? Yeah.
Colleen Francis: No, yeah. I started to say to people that we need to focus on better practices. I think the reason I say that is because best practices sound like they’re timeless and can’t be changed. That’s the best practice, right? And so, it’s a little tongue in cheek because there’s always going to be some best practices, right? I suppose. We could always say we have to build rapport and people must like us and trust us. But the way we do that today with one set of customers might be very different than the way we do that in three months from now with a different set of customers. So, what I encourage sellers to do is look at what’s working in an opportunity or with an account or with someone in your office right now and say to yourself, should I be applying that as a change in my sales process? And then don’t get wedded to having to do it that way for the next year. [6:39]
Nancy Calabrese: Right, right. Well, I think what you’re saying is you always must reevaluate best practices. Yeah, and how often do you recommend that you do that?
Colleen Francis: Yes. Well, I honestly recommend that people evaluate individual best practices in sales, like the types of questions you might ask or the people you’re reaching out with, you know, on a quarterly basis. So, I would do, you know, a quarter in review and say what worked and what should I do more of and what didn’t work so well and why and how should I change that or eliminate it. [7:13]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Now your recent book, Right on The Money, I’m curious what prompted you to write it, and what does it mean?
Colleen Francis: So interesting about this book is it was written and already to go in on January 1, 2020, let’s say. So, I wrote it through all of 2019. And I was inspired by a lot of the changes that were going on, you know, in 2018, 2019. And then of course, the world changed, especially the selling world in, you know, the first quarter of 2020. And I had to rewrite the whole book because the speed of change happened so much faster in 2020. So much of what I wrote about in 2019 wasn’t true anymore suddenly. And I got a firsthand look at what very successful sellers were doing to sell in that pandemic because my clients were all classified as essential services. So, they had no choice but to be at work and to be servicing. They were in the oil and gas industry, manufacturing sectors, agriculture. So, they had to make it work. They had to figure it. Nobody could just kind of sit back and say: “Hey, we’ll just wait this out”. Everybody had to find a way to make this work. And so, um, I reoriented the book, um, in, um, that year to be really focused on, uh, you know, what the next phase of selling is going to look like. And right on the money is really this balance between being customer centric or customer focused, and metrics are internal focus, like sales velocity focus. So, companies that focus too much on their own internal targets and make calls, make calls, make calls fail one way. Companies that over-rotate and take this attitude of, oh, the customer is always right, and they often fail for a different reason, and what we need is a balance. [9:15]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah, huh. You know, speaking of COVID and the pandemic and how it switched selling, there were so many people, I don’t know how many now, but in the early days that swore that they couldn’t sell, they must only sell face to face. Now I have spent my whole career selling virtually. What do you have to say about that?
Colleen Francis: Well, I had an interesting experience during COVID with a bunch of sellers who had, they were very experienced, let’s just say. Their manager called them the silver foxes. And they, when things shut down and they weren’t allowed to go on site to see their clients, or they weren’t allowed to come into the office, they literally crossed their arms and said, oh, when this thing clears up, we’ll go virtual. But other than that, we’re not doing anything. And you know they soon learned that wasn’t going to be any time soon. So, they had to learn how to use virtual selling. And then people would say to me, well, COVID is over. We can go out. We’re in Texas, right? Or we’re in Florida. We can go out. And then, you know, Texas gets a massive ice storm or supply chain, you know, happens, or people don’t go back to work, or offices don’t go back to work full-time. And so, you’ve got people all over the place working from home. And a lot of sellers who put there, you know, their stake in the ground realized, wow, if I want to have an effective meeting, I’m going to have to stay virtual or be hybrid because I’m not going to, you know, the buyer’s house where they’re working today. So, yeah. So, I’ve said, it’s not a question of whether you do virtual or whether you, 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. [11:12]
Nancy Calabrese: True. I think you raise a good point. It’s about them, not about you. Yep. You have developed a concept of critical mass influence and how to use it successfully. Tell us about that.
Colleen Francis: So critical mass influence is, so 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? And 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 who our buyers and 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 doing that. It’s not just a sales responsibility. It’s a marketing responsibility. It’s customer service, its operations, it’s finance. I mean, everyone who has access to a computer can, can get on LinkedIn and share the company’s message, right? Um, and it could just be, it honestly could be Mary from accounting who posts a company, um, message on her own personal LinkedIn that causes another finance professional down the road to say: “Oh, wow, we need that tier”. [13:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. That’s right. You know, speaking about your comment, it would be easy to find how often do you recommend posting on LinkedIn and other social media sites?
Colleen Francis: Right? Ha ha ha. So, my formula, because I’m also really cautious, I don’t want salespeople on social media eight hours a day, right? So, my, no, we got to pick up the phone and call, right, eventually. So, I have a process called the tempo triad. I ask people to select three different media types. For most of my clients, it’s some combination of LinkedIn, maybe Facebook, book, or Instagram if they’re in a really visual type of product. For some people it is X or formerly known as Twitter or something else. Maybe it’s an email or a marketing message. And I asked them to do three things. One comment on something that one of your clients or associations is saying, so people see that you’re paying attention to them. Two, repost something that a client or an influencer or an association is doing again, so they see that: “Oh, Colleen’s paying attention to me”. And three, post something unique. So, it could be something that your marketing team has written or you or something about your product, but something unique. At a bare minimum, I like to see that done three times a week on all three of those platforms. [15:00]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Okay. Huh. I saw on your website, you have a video, how to ask effective sales questions. Talk to us about that.
Colleen Francis: Oh, so many things we could be asking about. So, one thing I think it’s really effective is to, first of all, we have to have a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions because that’s how a conversation flows naturally. So, I encourage salespeople to not be afraid of a closed-ended question because it will help you direct the conversation to one way or the other depending on where it needs to be. We also must be really 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. 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 really ask effective questions. [16:36]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh, that’s pretty bad. Wow. You know what? Now I’m going to really pay attention to the questions people are asking me. I don’t let you know if I catch them. You know, I guess, has selling really changed all that much?
Colleen Francis: Ah, you raise a good question. I think there’s a number of things that are similar and some things that are different. I mean, obviously technology, right? When my dad was selling, he didn’t, I remember when a first beeper came to the house, right? It wasn’t even a pager, it just beeped. So, the advent of technology has, that’s really been the game changer and it’s done a couple of things. You could argue that what hasn’t changed is we still have to have built trust, we must ask questions, we have to meet buyers, right? We must engage in stakeholder alignment. All those things are the same and we’ve had to do that for decades. The tools in which we do those things, execute on those have changed. Some buyers prefer to use online sources. I was having a chat with one of my own clients on Friday afternoon via text. [17:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay.
Colleen Francis: We were negotiating, you know, we were talking through a six-figure contract, but it was the easiest thing because she was on a plane. She could text, but email would have been too slow. I couldn’t call her because she was literally waiting to take off. And so, I must be comfortable being able to have a professional conversation over text. Now that makes my life easier and it makes it harder because as a sales pro, I’ve got to be a master of all these tools. On the other hand, it makes it easier because I wouldn’t have gotten 15 minutes of her attention, you know, on a Friday afternoon if I had insisted on a face-to-face or a phone call. So, I think that that’s really critical. [18:32]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Wow, yeah. You know, when you said about technology, when I first got into sales, there were no faxes and no computers. I don’t know how I did it or how we all survived, but we did, there was the phone, there was the phone. That’s interesting. It’s a good thing.
Colleen Francis: Yeah. And that’s hard because a lot of people will say, well, I don’t like that social media stuff. I’m like, well, I don’t care if you don’t like it or not. If your clients are there and you’re not there, then you’re invisible to them. Right. So prospecting is much easier as well than it ever used to be because we have so many other sources. We, I mean, you know, 30 years ago, prospecting to me was either cold calling, pure cold calling from the phone book or physical door knocking. I mean, you can’t really do a lot of physical door knocking these days. A lot of doors are locked. Phone books don’t exist. So, LinkedIn is kind of our phone book, but people aren’t answering their phones. I mean, there’s a whole lot of businesses that don’t even have main switchboards anymore. [19:38]
Nancy Calabrese: I get it. I get it. But you know, it’s perseverance. And to your point, you must try different marketing channels to get the attention of the prospect. Colleen, we are out of time. I cannot believe it. It went by so fast. How can my audience find you?
Colleen Francis: Yes. Well, true to form, I’m an easy person to find. So, you can find me on LinkedIn by Colleen Francis. You can find me on my website, EngagedSelling.com. You can find me on Facebook, on Twitter, on TikTok, on Instagram. Simply, I am all over the place. My doctor says to me, Colleen, I’m not even on social media, and I see you on social media. [20:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Ha ha. You’re all over the place, huh? All right, so people out there, don’t be shy. Take advantage of this lady’s expertise. She’s knowledgeable, but she’s also a lot of fun, Colleen, and I really, really enjoyed her conversation. And I hope we can do this again in the future. Would you come back?
Colleen Francis: Absolutely. We’re great fun.
Nancy Calabrese: Love it. So until we speak again, people make it a great sales day, make it a great Colleen day, and give her a call. See you next time. [20:59]
