Search Results
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The Philosophy of the Red Sox and Gallop Will Lead to Increased Revenue
- March 30, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Leadership believed they were very good at doing these things. However, everything is relative. The key question is, good compared to who?
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The Science of Sales Effectiveness
- March 1, 2023
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Categories:
The Modern Science Behind Sales Force Excellence provides insights, commentary and conclusions reached from our Sales Force Effectiveness Study, conducted during the latter part of 2014.
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This is What Would Happen if Bob Got Promoted to Sales Manager
- February 7, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For those of you who are familiar with my series of articles about Bob – the worst salesperson ever – you can catch up by enjoying, laughing, and making fun of him here. 12 of the articles that show up on that page are about Bob!
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Made Up Sales Statistics and Their Contrast to Real Data
- February 2, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A sales consultant who knows that I geek out on sales data read that 84% of salespeople suck because they don’t enjoy what they do. A huge percentage of salespeople do actually suck but the actual number is closer to 75%. Is it really because they don’t enjoy selling?
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The Science of Salesperson Selection
- January 17, 2023
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Categories:
In 1964, Harvard Business Review published “What Makes a Good Salesman”, an article by Herbert M. Greenberg and David Mayer. They detailed their four-year study of salespeople and explained the commonalities they observed in better salespeople. They learned, for the first time, that good salespeople had the following two characteristics in common.
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New Data: Is Sales Compensation Aligned With Changing Motivational Needs?
- October 31, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When interviewing sales and sales leadership candidates, similar counter-intuitive discussions occur. Many candidates claim that money isn’t that important because they love sales – until they claim that the base salary isn’t high enough. For others, even though they may not disclose it, the base salary is completely irrelevant as long as the company won’t cap the salesperson’s total earnings. We need to decode the topic of compensation so that we can be sure that both the base salary and the total on-plan earnings are acceptable to candidates.
It is very important to make sense of the hidden and unpredictable compensation responses because many salespeople leave the company after a short time because they don’t believe earnings are equivalent to the compensation that was promised.
It is crucial to understand that salespeople are motivated primarily by one of two motivational styles and unless you wish to hire only one type of salesperson, there must be two compensation plans that should be tailored accordingly. Let’s discuss this.
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How Your Sales Team Can Double its Win Rate in a Recession
- September 26, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A client was having great success using OMG (Objective Management Group) to assess their sales candidates and they assumed the sales candidate assessment was the only thing OMG offered. When they learned that our core offering is evaluating their existing sales team they became excited about what that would mean for addressing their two biggest selling challenges.
One of their issues was their 20% win rate was much lower than they thought it should be and they believed their salespeople needed some refresher training on closing. They also had a large number of opportunities stalled in the pipeline and they believed that training on more effective techniques to conduct follow up calls would help.
In this article, I thought it might help if I share a bit of what they learned about their sales team.
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Can My Car Uncover Sales Qualification Criteria Better Than Most Salespeople?
- August 8, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Wouldn’t it be great if salespeople had the equivalent of two camera intelligence to see what they don’t know they need to see?
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Do You Know the Accurate Reason Why a Salesperson Is Not Performing?
- April 20, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
How quickly can you determine why a salesperson is failing?
Dinger loves to play catch with his ball. He has seven of them but loves his white ball the most. When we’re out playing catch and I point to a ball and say, “there it is” or “right there” or “get it” he just can’t seem to find it! Dinger has good listening skills but his ability to see the obvious isn’t very good.
Such was the case earlier this week when a surprised client wanted an explanation for why one of their salespeople, who does not perform very well, scored well on his evaluation. “How can someone who is not my top performer score better than someone who is my top performer?”
That sounded like a challenge so I said, “Let’s go!”
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Top Sales Videos and Rants From Dave Kurlan
- March 21, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
From time to time I record impromptu unscripted rants as well as some that are more well thought-out videos. From among the collection presented below, most are rants so the rants are much more popular. The most-watched (I have added to the list so there are more than 10 now!) videos are shown below in order of popularity and while I like all of them, I indicated my personal favorites with an asterisk. All but three of the videos are three-minutes or less, one is six-minutes, one is ten-minutes and one is eight-minutes. Topics include: