Search Results

  • Sales and Selling – Which Has Evolved More?

    • January 19, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Let’s compare the evolution of selling to the evolution of salespeople.

    Which do you think has evolved more?  After all, both have been around since there has been anything to sell.

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  • The Defining Moments in your Sales Cycle

    • January 13, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    What are some of the more subtle, but important, key moments in your sales process that affect every sales outcome?

    If I were to review some recent conversations with clients and their salespeople, crucial accomplishments included:

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  • What is Maximum Effort on the Sales Force?

    • January 11, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    here is a third type of salesperson, one of the elite top 5%, who can consistently maintain maximum effort for much of the year.  But that salesperson isn’t the norm.  So the questions that come from this are these:

    Are the top 5%’ers A players or super human players?

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  • Your Sales and Sales Management Questions Answered Part I

    • December 15, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In an article last week, I provided the post to a sales competency contest. The final question in that survey asked the participants for any sales issues they needed help with. Today I’ll answer the first four of those questions below:

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  • Are Sales Cycles Really Getting Shorter?

    • December 11, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I read an article that claimed that winning sales cycles are getting shorter. 

    While I agree with everything else in the article, I questioned the 23% shorter because our substantial data does not support this claim.  So where could the discrepancy be?

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  • Ultimate Comparison of Top Salespeople versus Salespeople That Fail

    • December 8, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If you’ve been following this Blog you know I sometimes refer to the elite 5% of salespeople, the next 20% and the bottom 74%.  After reading Super Freakonomics I was moved to take a new look at our data on the more than 400,000 salespeople we have assessed.  Behavioral scientists would look at our data on the top 5% and report on some common findings.  It might look like this: 

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  • Sales 2.0 Competencies, Changes and Myths

    • December 7, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    There has been much talk about Sales 2.0 yet most sales experts can’t agree on exactly what it is.  But before we can even discuss Sales 2.0, I must confess that most companies have yet to get on board with good old Sales 1.x!  Most companies are still selling without formalized sales processes, effective strategies and effective tactics.  Most companies still have their salespeople show up, present, demo, quote and wait for the business. 

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  • Lance Armstrong’s Metrics Applied to the Sales Force Equals Results

    • December 4, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Recently, I completed Lance Armstrong’s 2001 book on how he became a champion cyclist, was diagnosed with Cancer, beat the cancer, and then returned to become the greatest cyclist in the world.  It was an inspiring, fast-reading book.  While this won’t come as a surprise to my cyclist friends, I was quite surprised to learn how metric-intensive competitive cycling is.

    While training for races, Lance uses a heavy and expensive power meter that measures output (wattage). For the big race, he uses a smaller and lighter top of the line cycling computer to track speed, heart rate, incline, cadence, altitude gain, and power output. He simply adjusts his cycling until the numbers are where they were when he was training at peak performance and he figures the rest will take care of itself. Wow.

    Sales is exactly the same.  You train hard and once the metrics have been established, you simply continue to meet those numbers and the rest will take care of itself.  Simple.

    There are only a few problems with this:

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  • Sales Systems and Processes – 8th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions

    • December 1, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    the 8th in my series of the Top 10 Sales Management Functions but it is #10 on my list.  Why am I going out of order? 

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  • Accountability – 2nd of the 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions

    • November 12, 2009
    • Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This is the 2nd in the series of the Top 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions.

    #1 – ACCOUNTABILITY

    In its simplest form, sales accountability consists of the following:

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