Search Results

  • New Data Shows that You Can Double Revenue by Overcoming This One Sales Weakness

    • October 22, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    My article revealed that salespeople who are burdened with the need to be liked are far less effective at selling than those who don’t have that weakness.  The biggest insight of all was that these salespeople were 47% less effective reaching decision makers!

    This article will take the same approach and use the same data from Objective Management Group’s (OMG) evaluations of 2,064,425 salespeople to look at salespeople who are uncomfortable having a financial conversation with their prospects and customers.  The latest data reveals that 60% of all salespeople have this weakness!  What do you think it will reveal?

    read more

  • Data Shows 1st Year Sales Improvement of 51% in this Competency

    • September 18, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I looked at the before and after scores for eight of the 21 Sales Core Competencies as well as the Reaches Decision Makers, Account Manager and Farmer competencies for a total of 11.  See the table below:

    read more

  • New Data Shows That Elite Salespeople are 700% Less Likely to Do This

    • August 20, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    How effective are salespeople when it comes to creating urgency?  I’m not talking about salespeople who create urgency by telling their prospects that if they don’t order today the price will go up or it won’t be available.  I’m talking about salespeople who create urgency by asking questions to uncover problems, the consequences and cost of which, create urgency.

    read more

  • Latest Data – Strong Salespeople Score 375% Better Than Weak Salespeople

    • July 18, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Some of you might have seen Bryce Harper’s incredible last-minute barrage of home runs in the 2018 All-Star game. It’s one of the highlights of summer!  Today I give you a barrage of my own with three killer videos and a powerful data-packed article.  

    read more

  • Sales Pipeline Data Shows That Most Late Stage Opportunities Just Aren’t

    • July 11, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If you happened to read the article about most salespeople being fired or arrested if they worked in accounting then this is the sequel – Arrested 2!

    read more

  • Latest Data Shows Most Salespeople Would be Fired or Arrested if they Worked in Accounting

    • July 2, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In this article, we will look to determine whether there is a correlation between sales percentile, sales pipeline and sales performance.  And as has been the case with the last ten articles like this, the data is sure to surprise.

    OMG includes a pipeline analysis as part of every Sales Force evaluation it conducts. We ask each salesperson 19 questions about four late-stage, proposal-ready/closable opportunities currently in their pipeline.  In the table below, the percentage of salespeople who actually had 4 late-stage opportunities on which they could report are sorted by Sales Percentile.

    read more

  • New Data – Are Experienced Sales Managers Better Sales Managers?

    • June 25, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week I wrote a revealing article which showed that Sales Managers are even worse than I thought when it comes to coaching their salespeople.  That article stimulated this great conversation on LinkedIn. 

    Following that article I dug further into the same 9,000 rows of data to look at the role that tenure and experience have on sales management effectiveness. Who do you think are more effective – newer or more experienced sales managers?

    read more

  • The Latest Data Shows That Sales Managers Are Even Worse Than I Thought

    • June 18, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today we’re diving into sales management and specifically, the Sales Management Coaching Competency. What you read will surely disappoint and shock you and might even cause you to puke in disgust.

    read more

  • Sales Playbook and CRM Problems – What the Data Tells Us

    • June 6, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    That leads me to the growing demand for Sales Playbooks.  Companies want them, get excited about them, believe they are important, pay tens of thousands of dollars for them, and invest many hours collaborating for a successful final document.  You won’t believe the wasteful things that happen next!

    read more

  • New Data Shows How Relationships and the Need to be Liked Impact Sales Performance

    • June 4, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In my most recent article, I shared data that showed a chain reaction would occur when salespeople have more than one major weakness in their Sales DNA and the second major weakness is their tendency to become emotional. As a trigger, the first major weakness causes the salesperson to become emotional, at which time their listening skills become compromised.

    That article can be found here and as of this writing nearly 6 dozen LinkedIn subscribers have contributed some very insightful comments here.  Their comments inspired me to dig even further and look into the correlation between relationship building that salespeople do and their need to be liked.  In this study, even I was surprised by what I found!

    read more