Colleen Francis joined me on the Conquer Local podcast to break down how sales leaders can finally break the boom and bust sales cycle inside their teams.
The boom and bust cycle inside a sales team is one of the oldest, most expensive problems in the business. Colleen Francis has spent 17 years helping organizations break out of it. When she joined the Conquer Local Podcast to talk about her book Nonstop Sales Boom, she delivered the clearest playbook I have heard on how to engineer consistent growth instead of riding the rollercoaster.
Colleen runs Engage Selling out of Ottawa and has worked with more than a thousand leading organizations across industries. She started out selling life insurance, then sold technology globally, and has been consulting ever since. Her whole career has been about making salespeople more productive with better methodology and better tools.
Why Sales Teams Ride a Rollercoaster
Colleen’s core thesis is that boom and bust is a systems problem, not a talent problem. Sellers have a great quarter, take their foot off the gas, and then scramble to fill the pipeline during the following quarter. Repeat forever. The fix is not motivational. It is structural.
The solution is a discipline of consistent activity across four stages of the customer relationship:
- Attracting the right prospects
- Participating in their buying process
- Growing the customer after the close
- Leveraging customers for referrals and advocacy
Do all four at the same time, every week, and the rollercoaster flattens out.
Technology Amplifies Good Salespeople
Colleen is fascinated by how much more effective sellers can be when they use the right tools. She described watching her dad’s sales career evolve from beeper, to pager, to car phone, to cell phone, to email. Each jump in technology produced a step change in seller productivity.
Here is the catch. Technology amplifies whatever the seller is already doing. Give a disciplined seller a better CRM and their output goes up. Give a disorganized seller the same CRM and nothing changes. The methodology has to come first.
Stop Measuring Activity That Does Not Matter
Colleen told a great story about a senior sales leader who was ticked off because one of his reps was not in the field every day. The rep was outperforming the rest of the team by a huge margin using a mix of phone, email, and targeted visits. He was saving on mileage, gas, and oil changes, and still crushing quota. The leader eventually had to admit maybe the old playbook was not the right playbook.
Her point was not that field selling is dead. It is that measuring activity for the sake of activity misses the entire question of whether the activity is producing outcomes.
Differentiate by Doing What Others Will Not
The real lesson in that story is differentiation. The seller who was outperforming the field was not working less. He was working differently. He was willing to try an approach his peers were not. That is the pattern I see across every high performer I have ever coached.
If you want to pair this with more on how the best sellers break out of the pack, see my post on the 10 elements of a successful sales pitch, and Nick Kane on situational fluency.
What I Took Away From Colleen
- Boom and bust is a systems problem, not a motivation problem
- Attract, participate, grow, leverage — run all four stages simultaneously
- Technology amplifies existing discipline, it does not create it
- Measure outcomes, not activity
Colleen Francis is one of the most thoughtful sales leaders writing today. If your team is stuck in the quarterly rollercoaster, her work is where I would start.
What does your current activity mix look like across attract, participate, grow, and leverage? If any one of those is empty this month, you already know where next quarter’s bust is coming from.