Search Results
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Baseball, The Toad and Coaching Unresponsive Salespeople
- April 11, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Coaching salespeople is challenging. When they aren’t responsive to coaching it’s not only more difficult, it is downright frustrating. When you’re attempting to coach unresponsive salespeople to use the phone to directly talk with a decision maker, there isn’t much upside. Whether you’ve made this coaching attempt one time or one hundred times, the outcome will be the same, so the question we should be asking is, should this salesperson still be working for you?
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The Powerful Similarity Between Bad Baseball Teams and Most Sales Teams
- April 17, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Stop using revenue to rank your salespeople or to conclude that your salespeople with the most revenue are good salespeople. It’s fiction. It’s BS. It’s misinformation. It will lead you to make bad decisions. Revenue represents what customers spend with you. Sales effectiveness is the measure of a salesperson’s ability to grow revenue by bringing in new business.
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This Company’s Best Salesperson was 2500% Stronger Than Their Worst
- February 1, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s been four months since the baseball season ended but college baseball begins in less than 4 weeks and it will be fun to watch our son play for his college team (while freezing our asses off!). It’s also been a while since the last time I shared a top/bottom analysis but I completed one this week that I had to share.
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Great Sales Managers are Like Great Baseball Coaches Without the Screaming
- March 15, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The biggest difference between great sales managers and crappy sales managers is how effectively they coach up their salespeople to make them better. There are two parts to this:
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How Gas Grills, Gardening, Masks, and Baseball Mimic Your Sales Team
- May 3, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My project corresponds so well with how many executives approach their sales teams.
They do nothing for years, and then, after growing frustrated with complacency and inability to grow revenue, finally decide to make changes and rebuild their sales teams.
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The Baseball Experience That Continues to Generate a 28% Increases in Sales
- February 10, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The challenge isn’t whether or not they’ll enjoy and benefit greatly from the training. The challenge is getting sales leaders to attend the training! There’s a little matter of ego. Most successful sales leaders have fairly large egos and while their egos helped spur them on to their current roles, now that they’re in their current roles, their egos sometimes obstruct their ability to improve, ask for help, and bring professional training into their companies. The voice in their head whispers thoughts like:
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Sales is Like Baseball and Baseball Can Save Capitalism and Liberty
- July 18, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Before you think that this applies only to youth baseball teams, I want to be clear. Sales teams are like this too. In the past 35 years I have personally trained hundreds of sales teams and tens of thousands of salespeople and sales teams always have the same 8 salespeople:
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The Top 8 Requirements for Becoming a Great Salesperson
- January 14, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Do you remember the moment you became a Salesperson? Not a presenter, Not an order taker, but a true consultative sales professional?
Here are some guidelines to identify the moment you turned professional.
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Another Powerful Reason Why Salespeople Struggle to Become Great Sales Managers
- February 2, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We talk a lot about the mistake so many companies make when they take their best salespeople and make them sales managers. While it’s not always a mistake, the most commonly discussed reasons include:
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Holiday Sales Treat – A Mashup of Two Classic Songs
- December 6, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This past weekend I read that the lyrics to the popular Christmas song, “Baby it’s Cold Outside” were rewritten to emphasize consent. And the weekend before I saw the news that Brady Bunch Mom, Florence Henderson, had passed away. That immediately caused the Brady Bunch theme song to come to mind but my brain tends to combine things. In 2005, when I combined sales and baseball, it became Baseline Selling, which when I looked as I was writing this, was still ranked #9 in the sales category on Amazon.com. So my brain went and combined the Brady Bunch Theme song with a lyric change and came up with this diddy on OMG.