Dave Kurlan

  • Five Great Lessons That Apply to Every Company That Hires Salespeople

    • November 2, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I turned sixty years old today and everyone is asking me how it feels to be sixty. To be honest, it feels exactly the same as it felt to be fifty-nine – which is essentially the same as it felt to be 40. Nothing has changed. And speaking of nothing changing, nothing has changed over at BigBrains where two updates have come my way. The first came from someone who knows the real identity of BigBrains and suggested that I refer to them as ShitForBrains instead. She must have met them!

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  • Can Salespeople Really Double Their Revenue by Solving This One Challenge?

    • October 28, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    While there are several sales analogies I could point to for this turn of events, there is one in particular that is crucial if your company sells more than one product or service.

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  • Part 4 – The Real Story Behind the Sales Selection Fiasco

    • October 21, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This week we discovered a statistical difference between those salespeople who currently work for a company whose sales force was evaluated, and those sales candidates who were applying for sales positions.

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  • Price Quotes and the Inability of Salespeople to Sell Value

    • October 19, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week, I was training a sales force to sell value – an absolutely revolutionary concept – when the unthinkable happened, not once, but twice in the same training.  As incredible as it was to me, it clearly illustrates why it is so darn hard for companies to get their salespeople to sell value.

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  • Is Benchmarking or Perfect Fit Analysis More Predictive for Selecting Great Salespeople?

    • October 7, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I will actually show you the difference between benchmarking and the Perfect Fit Analysis that we use as proof to clients and to customize Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessments.

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  • Great Selling Lessons in The Martian – But Should You See the Movie?

    • October 5, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It was with great anticipation, but limited expectations, that we went to see The Martian this weekend.  Not only was it the first book that I read where the movie was even better than the book, but there were some great, important lessons on selling to large organizations too!

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  • Sales Selection Case History – The Fix for This Insanity Works 99% of the Time

    • October 2, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If you had a crystal ball to predict whether or not your next sales candidate would succeed in a difficult selling role at your company, wouldn’t you want to use it?  Heck, you would want to look into that thing even if it wasn’t a difficult selling role.  But what if you were recruiting kids right out of college?  What would you do then?  Would you just recruit a whole bunch of kids and keep the ones who didn’t quit?  Would you hire three times more than you needed and just keep the ones who were successful?  Would you just hire anyone who looked and sounded good and go from there?  What if you could use the crystal ball?  Could that even work with college grads?  Recently, we had an opportunity to study and answer that very question and the results will surprise you!

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  • Sales Slumps – What Causes Them and How to Fix Them

    • September 28, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    During the course of a baseball season, both hitters and pitchers fall into slumps. In basketball, players slump with their outside shots and from the foul line. Football Quarterbacks go into passing slumps. Golf and Tennis pros have swing slumps. Tiger has been in a slump since Thanksgiving of 2009! (I’m sure there must be some kind of a slump that Soccer players can fall victim to, but I don’t know enough about soccer to weigh in.) With slumps being so common, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that salespeople get into slumps too. In this article, we’ll explore what causes salespeople to get into slumps, what their slumps look like, and how can they be fixed.

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  • Why Prospects Won’t Talk with You and How to Fix it

    • September 24, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Would you put steaks and burgers on the grill before it was hot?  Would a pitcher throw as hard as he could without first throwing some long-toss and then pitching 20-30 slower pitches?  Would a runner sprint without stretching?  If you were in a cold climate in the middle of winter and your car was parked outside overnight, would you shift into drive without letting the engine warm first?  If the concept of warming up makes perfect sense, then why in the world wouldn’t salespeople do this?

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  • The Secret to Coaching Salespeople and Why It’s So Scary 

    • September 21, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I learned that the way in which sales leaders react to the exact same material differs exponentially in accordance with the time we have to discuss it.

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