Dave Kurlan

  • How to Hire the Right Salespeople Using This Jeep vs. Infiniti Analogy

    • October 7, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Usually, the overall score, relative strength of a candidate’s capabilities, and recommendation are more important than any specific scores.  Usually.  But with the assessment of Mary, it was an entirely different story.  

    Let’s review the scores and findings from Mary’s OMG Sales Candidate Assessment. She had really good scores.  Really good. Her Sales Percentile was 82 so she was stronger than 82% of the salespeople in the world. So was OMG wrong?  Why did the company hire her?  Why did she fail?

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  • How Your Sales Team Can Double its Win Rate in a Recession

    • September 26, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A client was having great success using OMG (Objective Management Group) to assess their sales candidates and they assumed the sales candidate assessment was the only thing OMG offered.  When they learned that our core offering is evaluating their existing sales team they became excited about what that would mean for addressing their two biggest selling challenges.  

    One of their issues was their 20% win rate was much lower than they thought it should be and they believed their salespeople needed some refresher training on closing.  They also had a large number of opportunities stalled in the pipeline and they believed that training on more effective techniques to conduct follow up calls would help.

    In this article, I thought it might help if I share a bit of what they learned about their sales team.

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  • How Many Authors Does it Take to Screw in a LightBulb Highlighting Selling Skills?

    • September 22, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Dan Caramanico alerted me to this dubious September 19, hbr.com article that explains their 5 Skills Every Salesperson Needs to Succeed.  It took three consultants to screw in the lightbulb that illuminates their five stupid-as-shit skills so let’s take a look:

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  • Is 28 Years Long Enough for a Sales Assessment Trial ?

    • September 19, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Isn’t 28 years long enough for us to prove ourselves?  

    Clearly OMG is not for everyone. Companies that sell at the lowest price, companies that are the brand leaders, and companies that have a transactional sale don’t need to hire good salespeople because their salespeople are order-takers.  But what about everyone else?

    After consistently proving its legendary predictive accuracy making it a no-brainer to use OMG, there are five possible reasons why companies didn’t use OMG  to assess their sales candidates over the past 28 years:

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  • 10 Sales Attributes That Don’t Differentiate Top Salespeople from Bottom Salespeople

    • September 12, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’ve written several articles (same as always) about OMG (Objective Management Group) Tailored Fits/Proofs of Concept where I analyze the differences between a company’s top producers and bottom producers to identify the findings/scores that differentiate their tops from their bottoms.  That is the science of sales performance and sales selection and the last time I wrote about it was in this article from February of 2022.  For comparison, the most recent example of a blowhard writing junk science without being scientific about what top salespeople do differently can be found in this article from August of 2022.

    Today’s article (new article) will go in the opposite direction and discuss strengths and skills that don’t differentiate tops from bottoms.  

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  • Found: A Great Article About How Important Salespeople Are

    • September 7, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Yesterday, although I wasn’t looking for it, I found my laptop charger that I misplaced a few weeks ago.  Today, I found a shirt I wasn’t looking for. It was purchased in May, but I had forgotten about it.  Later today, a post appeared in my LinkedIn feed and although I wasn’t looking for an article by a physician, I read it and am so glad I did.

    Would you like to know what I loved about that article?  I’ll share, but first, consider that…

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  • How Closing a Tough Sale is Nearly Identical to Hitting a Home Run

    • August 25, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You’re watching a baseball game on television and the announcer says, “And here’s the pitch and there’s a long drive hit deep to left field and it’s deep, it’s up, it’s way back and GONE!!!!!  Home Run Dave Kurlan!”  OK, the announcer never said the Dave Kurlan part. Not even close. I was a singles hitter.  And I never played at a level that had announcers.  So there’s that.  For entertainment sake, watch this classic 2-minute clip of Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs hitting the magical home run at the end of the movie, The Natural, one of my all-time favorite baseball movies right up there with The Sandlot and Field of Dreams.

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  • Which is Worse – The Boston Red Sox or Your Sales Team?

    • August 23, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The construction of the Red Sox roster is simply a Stupid as Shit Strategy or SaSS. Use of the word strategy means that it’s intentional and is a disservice to the word stupid!

    Sales team construction usually lacks formal strategy and that suggests something accidental is at play. We tend to see the “we already had these salespeople” and then “these are the new salespeople who were willing to work for us.” New is a relative term as the newest 30% of the team continues to churn when and if they find candidates.

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  • Must Read – How a 15% Corporate Minimum Tax Will Impact Companies and Sales Teams

    • August 10, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The primary point of today’s article is to point out the irony of hiring 80,000 agents but you’ll have to read a bit of background before I can point out the irony.

    So why are they hiring 80,000 IRS agents?

    They want the rich to pay their fair share and that sounds fair, but let’s go beyond the headline and general talking point.  There are 724 billionaires in the US (of 2,775 worldwide) and it’s not that hard to find a millionaire because there are 20 million of them in the US (50 million worldwide).  If they target billionaires it would work out to 110 new agents per billionaire.  Sounds like overkill.  They also want to make sure that corporations pay their fair share so this legislation imposes a minimum 15% tax on corporations. 

    Let’s focus on the 15% tax for a moment. I can think of only three ways for corporations to deal with that surcharge:

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  • Can My Car Uncover Sales Qualification Criteria Better Than Most Salespeople?

    • August 8, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Wouldn’t it be great if salespeople had the equivalent of two camera intelligence to see what they don’t know they need to see?

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