Dave Kurlan

  • Those Who Follow Sales Best Practices Don’t Necessarily Become Top Performers

    • June 24, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You’ll regularly find me writing about the science – the data – that differentiates top sales performers from the bottom.  But today, I’ll move into the world from which everyone else in this space operates – anecdotal evidence and opinions. 

    I will cite two sources for this article:

    The 130 sales consulting firms that partner with me at Objective Management Group (OMG) and provide our award-winning sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments;
    The tens of thousands of salespeople, sales managers and sales leaders that I have personally trained.

    In both groups of people I have noticed a few things that are common to the tops and not so much the bottoms and I’m certain that if you paid attention, you would recognize some of the same patterns in your organization.

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  • What Percentage of New Salespeople Reach Decision Makers?

    • June 20, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I reviewed a new set of around 8,500 rows of data today.  I wanted to know what percentage of salespeople were able to get past gatekeepers, including voice mail systems, and reach decision makers. This was very interesting!

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  • Surprising New Data on Salespeople Busts the Myths about Relationship Selling and Social Selling

    • June 16, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I had a theory about salespeople, but didn’t have the data to prove it out.  I believed that social selling was a godsend to those in sales who were not great at relationship building – that by utilizing applications like LinkedIn and Twitter, they could reach out to new people, but with the benefit of hiding behind the glass screen. Do you think I was right?  Or wrong?

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  • A CEO’s Guide to the Differences in Sales Leadership Roles

    • June 15, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I was reviewing a sales leadership evaluation with my client, a CEO, who was a bit confused over how this was different from a sales management evaluation.  He wondered, “Aren’t sales managers and sales leaders the same?”

    He has a sales force that was typical of a mid-size business with a Sales VP (the sales leader), 2 sales managers, and about 15 salespeople between them.  In my experience, there is a boatload of confusion over the differences between Sales Managers, Sales Directors, Sales VP’s, Regional Sales Managers, National Sales Managers, Senior Sales VP’s, Worldwide Sales VP’s, Sales Operations VP’s, Sales Enablement VP’s and Chief Revenue Officers.

    Let’s attempt to explain some of the important differences between Sales Managers and the other Sales Leadership roles.

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  • The One Sales Data Point That Varies Wildly

    • June 13, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In my last article, we discussed big data and big lies in the sales assessment space and touched on OMG’s 230,000,000 data points.  Most of the data points are very consistent across cultures and continents, but there is one that varies wildly depending on the role, the country, and the culture.

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  • Big Data and Big Lies Have Arrived in the Sales Training and Assessment Space

    • June 3, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Yesterday I received an email that you might have received too.  It was a promotion from Top Sales World (TSW) to download a “Free Big Data-Driven Sales Training Report for Your Industry.”  TSW was simply the messenger in this case, with the provider being The Sales Board.  Like many of you, I clicked through and saw that their report was based on their assessments.  And this is where it got really interesting for me!  Their website read an awful lot like OMG’s – only the numbers were very different…

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  • The Sales Success Secret Shared by Bill Walton and John Wooden

    • May 24, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Bill talked about the basketball team’s practices and how they were so well scripted, incredibly challenging and the most fun. He called them symphonies! The practices were so powerful that the games, even against the best competition, were always much easier than practice.  The games were so easy that the players did not need to remember plays or even think.  All they had to do was execute.  The team’s system of running the fast break was so well ingrained that executing was easy. This led to an 88-game winning streak!

    Translating this story to selling, I need to point out that most salespeople not only hate to practice (read role-playing), but don’t believe it is necessary. 

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  • What Do You Blame When Salespeople Don’t Schedule Enough New Meetings?

    • May 23, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most salespeople suck on the phone. If you read that article, you learned about 10 common mistakes that salespeople make on the phone. But those are strategic and tactical mistakes – they are skill-based. What happens when you have salespeople who won’t even make calls? Could they be suffering from call reluctance? Objective Management Group (OMG) measures 21 Sales Core Competencies and one of them is the Hunter Competency.

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  • How Boomers and Millennials Differ in Sales

    • May 18, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I hate this article already – the last thing we need is another article to help us to understand Millennials. Except for one thing. Most of you reading this are Millennials and you probably need to better understand boomers.

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  • 4 Great Sales Lessons from a Notre Dame Commencement Ceremony

    • May 17, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    We were fortunate to be in the audience for the 2016 Notre Dame Commencement where Vice President Joe Biden, former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired 4-Star General, Martin Dempsey were among the speakers.  While all were good, Biden had one great takeaway, and the General shared 3 tips and an action step. I believe that these are all share-worthy and apply to sales and sales leadership as well, and perhaps even better than they apply to those graduating from universities.

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