Search Results

  • How to Compensate Sales Hunters, Farmers and Account Managers

    • May 27, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today I received an email from a long time reader with this interesting question:

    “We’ve heard a good hunter won’t farm and a good farmer (account manager) won’t hunt. If this is true how do we tackle the model of compensating hunters who bring in new customers who then turn it over to an account manager to grow the business?  Is it possible to expect someone who can hunt and then manage a book of business or does that create a conflicting sales profile?”

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  • Money Motivated Salespeople a Dying Breed

    • April 8, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I mined the data on 150,000 salespeople that were assessed in the past three years, a period of time that includes both the pre and post economic crash. I noted that the only data point that has changed for salespeople is the percentage that were Money Motivated.

    50% fewer salespeople are money motivated today as compared to the findings from 2007.

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  • The Science of Achievement Applied to Sales Success

    • November 29, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Many salespeople have been in sales for ten plus years and aren’t the best of the best.  They’re not even in the top 26%.  I will use science to explain this.  If we go back and look at Objective Management Group’s data on the salespeople that have been assessed so far, we find that 22% are not trainable (no incentive to change) and another 10% shouldn’t even be in sales.  So that leaves 42% unaccounted for.  What about them? I dug through the data and found that:

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  • NY Times Articles Hits Then Misses the Mark on Sales

    • November 18, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Compensation is tricky and one size never fits all.

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  • Kurlan & Associates one of four companies offering a FREE Sales Force Makeover.

    • October 1, 2010
    • Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
    • Category: News

    Kurlan & Associates, in partnership with Landslide, Objective Management Group and Sales Compensation Strategies, will provide the winning company with a complete sales force makeover.

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  • Sales Recruiting – How Long Can You Keep This New Salesperson?

    • August 19, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Back in April, I posted an article that was actually my third in a series on Sales Longevity – the science of predicting sales turnover.  In that article I provided a link to my latest White Paper on the subject and suggested that this new science would someday become a new feature in our already cutting edge Sales Candidate Assessments.  Well, that day is upon us.

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  • The Top 5 Factors to Predict Sales Turnover

    • March 5, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Here are the Top Five Factors to Predict Sales Turnover / Longevity

    The most important factor in predicting sales longevity is

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  • Salesperson ROI – How Long Must They Stick to Pay Off? – Part 1

    • March 4, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Is there a connection between sales success and tenure?  Is it really a given that a successful salesperson will stick around longer than an unsuccessful salesperson?

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  • Top 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions – What’s Missing?

    • December 9, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I was asked a really good question yesterday.  Why wasn’t the Sales Force Evaluation or the Sales Candidate Assessments part of my series on the Top 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions?

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  • Lance Armstrong’s Metrics Applied to the Sales Force Equals Results

    • December 4, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Recently, I completed Lance Armstrong’s 2001 book on how he became a champion cyclist, was diagnosed with Cancer, beat the cancer, and then returned to become the greatest cyclist in the world.  It was an inspiring, fast-reading book.  While this won’t come as a surprise to my cyclist friends, I was quite surprised to learn how metric-intensive competitive cycling is.

    While training for races, Lance uses a heavy and expensive power meter that measures output (wattage). For the big race, he uses a smaller and lighter top of the line cycling computer to track speed, heart rate, incline, cadence, altitude gain, and power output. He simply adjusts his cycling until the numbers are where they were when he was training at peak performance and he figures the rest will take care of itself. Wow.

    Sales is exactly the same.  You train hard and once the metrics have been established, you simply continue to meet those numbers and the rest will take care of itself.  Simple.

    There are only a few problems with this:

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