Blog
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Can Preventing Hiring Bias Benefit the Sales Hiring Process?
- August 21, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You’re hiring and you need to identify the ideal salesperson for a particular sales role and you need someone to sell enterprise solutions to the C-Suite. Aside from all of the other requirements, you’ll need to find someone who has done this before.
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Insights Revealed in The Ultimate Analysis of the Sales Force
- August 16, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
They say that data is king and all this time I thought it was Elvis who was King. Who knew? Unfortunately, it all sounds a bit authoritarian so what if we just say that great data can provide us with great insights so that we can make better decisions?
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How Executives Fail to Understand the Reasons for Poor Sales and Revenue Performance
- August 11, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I can tell you that once in a blue moon, after we evaluate a sales force and present our findings, a rare CEO can become defensive and react poorly to the results. When it happens, it’s usually a sign that the CEO is out of touch with the sales force. I’ll share some of the things to which they sometimes react badly:
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Great, Previously Unread Sales Research Uncovered
- August 2, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I thought I was pretty smart but I was wrong. The authors of this article are way smarter than me.
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12 Reasons They Didn’t Like You Enough to Buy From You
- July 28, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You worked hard and smart, thought you did a great job, expected to win the business, but didn’t. Later, you learned that the prospect “Didn’t really like your style.”
It’s not at all unusual, but it is almost always misinterpreted. Salespeople tend to take this personally by internalizing the comment as, “They just didn’t like me. But why?”
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What We Can Learn from the Latest Data on Sales Motivation
- July 25, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sales Motivation is just one of the 21 Sales Core Competencies that we measure, but as with all of the competencies, we go very deep.
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Grammar – Why Commas Provide Sales Success Where Periods Fail
- July 19, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The problem is one of grammar. All of the articles you read, videos you watch and audios you listen to suggest that there is a key to sales success. Period. But if you change the period to a comma, you’ll quickly see that all of these things are crucial to success in sales.
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Crucial Selling Take Aways from the 2017 Home Run Derby Lead to Sales Greatness
- July 12, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Did you watch the Home Run Derby on Monday night? I’ve never seen anything like it. You could see thunder and lightening through the glass wall in left field as thunderstorms raged while all the home runs were being launched. Wow, what a show! Of course, my mind always looks for a correlation to selling and there are some good ones here.
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30 Interesting Non-Selling Subjects to Make You Better at Selling
- July 5, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I was sitting next to a guy who knows that our son is one of the best ball players in his age group in New England. He is from the former Soviet Union and when he told me that he tought his son to play catch I was confused. I said, “You didn’t play baseball growing up – how were you able to teach him?”
He said, “When I was in school, we may not have played baseball, but we did have to practice throwing grenades and it’s exactly the same motion!”
Who knew?
And he didn’t know at the time that practicing grenades would prepare him for something completely different years later.
The same goes for sales. There are so many subjects, all unrelated to selling, that can make salespeople more effective.
I’ve written about many of these subjects before. Don’t click on all of them though. Find 3 that interest you and read only those. Then leave a comment below on how that could help you.
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Sales Effectiveness – How to Win Every RFP That You Respond To
- June 19, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I am amazed by the sheer number of salespeople who believe they must respond to an RFP, RFQ or RFI. The resources, including people, time and money, required to respond to the specs from just one of these requests is daunting. Some companies have so many requests coming in that they spend all of their time responding to them. This is crazy! Do you respond to every email you receive? Every call you get? After all, it’s a request, not a demand. So why the frenzy over responding and replying so quickly? You won’t believe some of the reasons!