Search Results
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Persistence Over Polish – What the Top 10% of All Salespeople Do Better
- March 12, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The best athletes in the world know exactly how they do the things they do that make them so great. In addition to their God-given talent, they outworked everyone else to master the mechanics and nuances of their sport, the mindset required for greatness, and competed at a high level from a very young age. When they falter they can easily make the adjustments necessary to get back on track.
Interestingly, most top salespeople don’t know what it is that they do that makes them so successful! That’s surprise #1. If you look through the data on the 2,.3 million salespeople that Objective Management Group (OMG) has assessed, you will see that the top 10% of all salespeople have better average scores than their colleagues in each of the 21 Sales Core Competencies. Their average scores are listed below for 5 Sales Core Competencies in which they have the best scores. They are:
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Predictions for 2018 – The Sales Triad Will Provide Record Sales Growth
- January 29, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
With and additional competition, I can tell you this. If you aren’t the low price leader, the best-known company, or the safest decision that a buyer can make, you will have to do some real SELLING to get that business. And not just selling, but thoughtfully, effectively, efficiently, and articulately selling value. What? You already sell value? Really? I’ll bet you don’t.
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What You Should Know When Your Cold Prospect Suddenly Returns From the Dead
- January 15, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week I wrote about the deep freeze, why prospects suddenly go cold, and how you can prevent that from happening. That article was instantly as popular as any I have ever written. I also posted a 6-minute cold-calling rant on LinkedIn that had more than five-thousand views after just a couple of days. The video, like the article, was about mindset, not scripting and tactics. And last week I also posted an article about writing a good prospecting email. It seems that there was a theme to the week and it resonated really well with the readers.
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7 Reasons Why Prospects Go Cold and How to Avoid it
- January 5, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you change your perspective about prospects going cold, you might discover that you caused them to go cold, rather than the myriad of other possibilities. I’ll explain.
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The Perfect Day for a Salesperson – 10 Ways to be More Efficient and Effective in 2018
- December 8, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You can be more effective and more efficient selling in 2018, do every single thing I wrote about in this article, exactly as I wrote it, and without any difficulty, by making a conscious decision to follow this blueprint. It’s not hard. It’s not scary. It’s not unusual. It’s not even thought-provoking. It’s simply a list of best practices that great salespeople (top 5%) do and that crappy (46%) salespeople either don’t do consistently or don’t do it at all.
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Have the Promises of Inbound Sales Come to Fruition?
- November 14, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week, I spoke at Inbound, where 19,000 people attended this sold-out event in Boston. Ironically, I spoke to a crowd that wanted to learn how to be more effective at engaging prospects by phone and converting those conversations to meetings. Why is it ironic? Well, the promise of the Inbound movement is that cold calling is dead. Salespeople will reap the benefits of inbound leads from prospects who had already expressed interest. Has that happened?
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Sales 102 – The Pitch Deck, the Price Reduction and the Data
- September 29, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Recently I met with a CEO whose salespeople were not closing enough business. We had just evaluated their sales force and I had the answers as to why their sales were so underwhelming. Before we could explain what was causing their problem, the CEO said something along the lines of, “We are going to create a new pitch deck and reduce our prices. That will solve the problem!”
They weren’t suggesting a small price change either. It sounded like an 80% reduction and their reasoning overlapped with one of the contributing issues that we identified. Their salespeople weren’t reaching decision makers which raises more questions. Why weren’t they reaching decision makers and could anything be done about it? Would lowering their prices solve the problem or did the issue go deeper than that?
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Dissecting the #1 Sales Best Practice
- August 26, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One company is attempting to create a compilation of best sales practices by sending out a weekly survey to sales leaders and asking them to choose from multiple choice questions what they most often do and teach. The topic changes each week. This is silly because (1) it just isn’t that simple, (2) it’s different for each selling role, each vertical, the decision makers they call on, their price points, the length of their sales cycle, and their respective competition, just to name a few. In addition, when you ask multiple choice questions like this, the answers will be so varied that there won’t be even a few, never mind a single best practice. Here is an example of what they asked this week:
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How Better Accountability Causes Sales Performance to Increase
- January 4, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sure, having goals is important, but having them in writing, with an achieve by date and a plan is exponentially more likely to have an actionable outcome than only having goals. And if you really want results, accountability is to goals as the accelerator is to the automobile. They both cause immediate action. Here’s what I mean.
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How to Finally Get Sales Selection Right
- June 16, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Before I share some crucial sales selection tips, I need to begin with some baseball. My apologies to all of my cricket and soccer obsessed readers.
My team, the Boston Red Sox, just lost their seventh consecutive game. They are in last place and heading for their third last place finish in the past four years. The outlier year was 2013, when they won the World Series. I think there was far less talent on that championship team than on this year’s edition, but the 2013 team had a rallying cry (Boston Strong) and everyone overachieved. You can’t count on everyone overachieving each year, so in lieu of that, as Jim Collins would say, you must have the right people in the right seats.