Search Results
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New Data: Will Salespeople Hit Quota When Sales Managers Coach and Sell?
- November 7, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Instead of spending their time on coaching, sales managers are spending too much of their time on personal sales. Sales managers with fewer than 5 salespeople may be required to carry a quota but generally speaking, sales managers are expected to spend no more than 5% of their time selling. OMG’s data shows that the percentage of time that sales managers sell is closer to 13%.
Why do they sell instead of having more coaching conversations? There are several reasons:
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You Can’t Lose Customers or Salespeople – 2 Secrets to Their Retention
- July 6, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There were lots of articles that had the top 5, 7, 10, 12, and 15 reasons why salespeople leave or quit their jobs. Most of those lists were simply subsets of other lists and the reasons included things like compensation, morale, workload, changing quotas, culture, toxic management, the job was misrepresented, too much pressure and lack of growth opportunity. While there were no surprises to these lists of reasons, I think there is a more pervasive reason that is not represented on the lists created by marketers and recruiters:
Sales Selection.
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62% Less Turnover and 80% Higher Quota Attainment When You Hire Salespeople the Right Way
- February 3, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you have a sales cycle of several months or more, subsidize your salespeople until they are self-sufficient, and in early 2022 it takes 3 months to find a suitable candidate, you are screwed before you start! Once you finally identify a decent candidate, you have hours, not days or weeks, to make a decision and pull the trigger and what’s the worst that can happen? Six months or more pass before you realize that salesperson won’t make it and you not only wasted a half year’s salary, you lost six months, have an empty territory or vertical, and have to start over from the beginning!
It doesn’t have to be that way and here’s why.
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Can You Find The Perfect Sales Candidates for Your Sales Team?
- December 1, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I am helping one company find a single needle-in-a-haystack sales leadership candidate and it has taken nearly six months. I am helping another company find 3 sales leaders and received 3,765 applications. What’s the difference?
For the answer to be meaningful, we have to look at the entire job market, not just sales candidates.
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Data: The Top 10% of All Salespeople are 4200% Better at This
- September 7, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My wife and I entered the small jewelry shop and were greeted – not with a warm welcome – but with a matter of fact “my name is…and I’m the owner…and I created everything in the store” which was followed by fifteen minutes of non-stop presentation of everything she created.
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How a Mug of Dunkin Can Help You More Effectively Sell Value
- December 9, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This is another Bob story. Bob was on a sales call and the prospect told him that they were looking for the lowest price. I hope you hate it when that happens. It’s a bad thing because while Bob was supposed to be selling value, a price-based conversation is transactional yet he’s supposed to be taking a consultative approach to support the value he provides. Would you like to guess what Bob did instead? Yup, he got them his best price. Ugh!
So what should Bob have done instead to turn this around and not waste everyone’s time?
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New Data Shows an Overlooked Finding Correlates to Sales Effectiveness
- October 15, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Compatibility is not only important, it could be one of the most overlooked criteria in hiring sales candidates. Let’s do a deep dive!
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Top 10 Reasons Not to Test Your Sales Candidates
- October 5, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Testing is not only normal, it’s expected.
So why in the world is it so difficult to get Sales Leaders and HR professionals to test sales candidates?
We hear everything, including this week’s top 10 reasons for not assessing:
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Masks and Sales Assessments – You Lose a Little Freedom and Control for Safety and Confidence
- September 18, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The same thing happens when clients use Objective Management Group’s (OMG) accurate and predictive sales candidate assessments. They lose a little freedom because they no longer arbitrarily interview salespeople who they feel like interviewing, and refrain from simply offering positions to people because they have a gut feeling about a candidate. However, they lose some control because one half to two-thirds of the candidates will not be recommended when they aren’t great fits for the particular sales role for which the company is hiring, or simply aren’t very good salespeople – period.
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Why it is so Difficult to Compare Sales Effectiveness from One Salesperson to Another
- July 15, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today we’ll discuss how to measure sales effectiveness of different salespeople despite there being so many variables to confuse the matter. You can scroll directly to that topic or, if you don’t mind, please read my 3 paragraphs of context.