Search Results
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Harvard Business Review Blog Off Target on Sales Greatness
- March 5, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This recent article in the Harvard Business Review Blog was as far off target as any I have ever debunked. Steve Martin lists 7 characteristics that he says differentiate great sales forces from good ones. His seven are:
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Sales Excellence Studies Propagate Mediocrity
- February 26, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you conduct a Google search for “sales excellence studies”, you’ll find more than 20,000 results. I’m sure that some results point to surveys which were conducted by others, but either way, that’s a lot of studies on sales excellence. If any of those studies were actually ground-breaking, insightful or truly representative of sales excellence, there would probably be fewer than a dozen. But there are not. There are many reasons why these studies are so lame, but let’s name just a few:
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Zig Ziglar’s Legacy to the Sales World
- November 28, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Zig died today at the age of 86. Seth Godin memorialized him here. I wrote about our chance meeting here 6 years ago.
I want to talk about Zig’s life and his sales and selling impact.
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Top 5 Reasons Why Sales Cold Calls Are So Awful
- November 12, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today I listened to voicemails from three salespeople who cold called me.
The good news is that three people actually made cold calls! The bad news is that not much has changed. Despite the tools, training, coaching, video, audio and reading that are available, all three calls were as bad as I’ve ever heard.
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When Sales Leaders Don’t Lead With Their Strengths
- November 5, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I received a request for all of my articles to date which reference Objective Management Group’s Sales VP/Director Assessment. I conducted a quick search and found – what? None! Out of nearly 1,000 articles, I hadn’t referenced OMG’s Sales VP/Director Assessment even once! I’ll fix that right now.
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2 Keys to Selling Success from Ann Romney and Chris Christie
- August 29, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I have been delivering that message for more than 20 years, not to citizens who must vote for a candidate, but to sales leadership, sales management and salespeople who let their need for approval – their need to be liked – interfere with every facet of what they do.
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Are Sales Leaders More Receptive to Training Than Salespeople?
- May 16, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When a room full of sales leaders arrive for two days of intensive training, there are many things that can and do happen. Here are ten of them:
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Top 5 Keys to Effective Sales Coaching and Results
- May 2, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One confusing component of effective sales management is that great sales management skills don’t always translate into great sales results. This phenomenon is most obvious when a company hires a terrific, new sales manager, who possesses all the desired skills, and the manager fails to have an immediate impact. Worse, in many cases, is when the inherited salespeople rebel! This scenario also occurs when sales managers go to seminars, watch video clips, read books or blogs, and attempt to extract specific skills and tips but don’t have the luxury of hearing them demonstrated, in context, in a real situation. When Objective Management Group conducts a sales force evaluation, we often see that sales managers’ skills are much better than the resulting effectiveness of those skills. Why is that?
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Challenges Don’t Always Require a Complete Sales Force Makeover
- April 19, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Many of the Sales Force Evaluations provided by Objective Management Group (OMG) reveal that the company’s problems run so deep that they will require a complete sales force makeover. However, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Sometimes, a single word, question or statement will change how every prospect responds.
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Sales Leaders Got These Issues All Wrong
- April 16, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I couldn’t help but notice that for most companies, including the best-in-class, their initiatives were not in alignment with the business pressures which they reported having. Here are their business pressures: