Search Results

  • 3 Steps You Must Take Today to Save Your Company From This Economic Downturn

    • March 12, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You know the stories of the Three Stooges, The Three Little Pigs, The Three Bears, and baseball fans have just heard about The Three Batter Minimum (how stupid!).  We’re not going to discuss any of those threes today but we will talk about the three things companies must do, right now, in this quickly disintegrating economy, to drive revenue.

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  • New Data Reveals a Finding That Correlates to Sales Success

    • January 29, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    We had a request for some data from one of our longtime partners.  My knee-jerk reaction to her request was that it would be a big nothing burger.  She asked for data that would show the difference between salespeople who are goal oriented and those who are not.  I did not expect much of a difference except in the area of Motivation but I was wrong.  Very wrong!  Check out some of the profound differences this data mining uncovered!

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  • Is Your Sales Force More Like a Dunkin’, Starbucks or Panera Drive Thru?

    • January 21, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This all begs the question, is the sales force at your company more like the Dunkin’, Starbucks, or Panera drive-thru?  Today’s article will explain how to answer that question.

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  • How All Those Trucks on the Road Can Help You Stop Discounting

    • August 5, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I have an awful lot to say about incentives to buy!
    The occurrences are as predictable as the 6pm news beginning exactly at 6pm.  If you have opportunities in the pipeline during the last week of the month, the last week of the quarter and the last two weeks of the year, and your prospects showed a strong likelihood of moving forward, they’ll be sitting back waiting for a call from a salesperson or sales manager to sweeten the pot so that you can get this deal in before the end of whenever.  How lame.  

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  • Putting Some Hollywood into Your Sales Presentations

    • June 18, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week I wrote about First Impressions and today’s topic is presentations.  That’s quite the change in direction from Consultative Selling, Sales Process, Assessments, and Performance.

    What do Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocket Man, Miracle and Argo have in common and what do they have to do with selling?

    What do Unbroken, Hunt for Red October, and A Few Good Men have in common and what is their relation to selling?

    Let’s tackle the issue of presenting your solutions to two different audiences:

    Those who are very familiar with what you have, what you do and how it works;
    Those who are unfamiliar with what you have, what you do and how it works.

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  • Your Last Chance to Make a Good First Impression

    • June 14, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most salespeople don’t take first impressions seriously enough. If they did, their first impressions would be much more favorable.

    I can still remember my first (unintentional) lesson about first impressions.  My family was gathered at my grandfather’s house to watch the debut of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show.  It was February 9, 1964 and at 8 years old, I was one of seventy-three million people watching the show that night.  I was as excited about this show as I would be later that same year when I attended my first Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park.  That is pretty excited! 

    Sitting on the carpet, I was completely focused on seeing and hearing The Beatles play five of their hit songs, but my mother was doing color commentary from the plastic covered sofa behind me.

    She said, “He’s cleaner than the other 3”, referring to Paul McCartney, who had straighter teeth, and a face more suitable for the mop top hair style shared by the four of them.

    There it was, my first lesson in judging people by how they looked, and more specifically, what “clean” did and did not look like.

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  • How to Know if You Are You Really Selling Consultatively

    • June 4, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most of the CEOs and sales leaders I speak with agree that their sales organizations need to be more effective at taking a consultative approach to selling. At the same time, they insist that they talk about it often and that their salespeople are doing OK with a consultative approach.  OMG’s Sales Force Evaluation usually reveals that they aren’t doing much more than talking about it, as their scores for the Consultative Seller competency are quite low.

    How can you determine if you or your team are being effective at using a consultative approach?  I created this list of outcomes that would be true if your consultative approach was working effectively.  You and/or your salespeople are :

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  • The 14 Lies Preventing Salespeople From Getting Their Prospects into a Buying State of Mind

    • May 17, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Let’s cover some of the lies being told to companies with sales organizations and how those lies prevent sales organizations from being their best.  Over the past 10-20 years, we have seen and heard the following proclamations (and you can find most of them with this Google search link:

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  • The 21-Day Solution for the Toughest Sales Weaknesses

    • April 5, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I wrote a popular article called, How the Rubber Band Sabotages Sales Performance.  That article discussed six competencies specific to Sales DNA and the impact those six have on performance when they appear as weaknesses.  At the end of last week’s article, I promised to introduce a solution to you within a week and true to my promise, the solution follows.

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  • Salespeople Make This Mistake – The Dumb Question I Was Asked in a Hotel Restaurant

    • February 15, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I pulled up to the entrance of the Doubletree Hotel, greeted Chris, and we walked into the hotel restaurant.  As we approached the table, a well-meaning server asked, are you an Honors member?  I said, “yes.”  

    A moment later she returned and said she couldn’t find me in the system.  She asked me to spell my name, went back to her computer, and returned again, saying, “I can’t find your reservation in the system.”

    I explained that I wasn’t a hotel guest and we were here for breakfast.  “Oh, then you’ll have to pay for your breakfast!”  

    “OK,” I said.  After all, I was expecting to pay for breakfast!

    Can you imagine how much simpler it would have been if her first question was, “Are you staying with us?”

    Salespeople make the exact same mistake.  How do I know?  I can prove this with several examples.

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