Search Results

  • The Recession is Here – How to Take Advantage and Prepare Your Sales Team

    • May 31, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    So what must you do to prepare your sales team and how can you leverage the effects of a recession?

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  • 5 Steps to Grow Sales by 33% in 12 Months

    • May 11, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sales teams go through periods like this too but sales leaders rarely seek out the data that would immediately point to the real problem.  They tend to hope things will improve and go from there. However, there are several levels of data to be reviewed so let’s take a look.

    As the article title suggests, there are five steps you must take to grow sales by 33% in 12 months.  You can’t pick and choose as all five are required.

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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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  • The Philosophy of a Pitching Coach Will Improve Your Sales Team

    • April 4, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I find ideas and material for this Blog everywhere, especially when I’m not looking for them. Yesterday I received a daily email from a Paul Reddick, a baseball coach who was drumming up some business for his baseball institute. It resonated – not for its baseball coaching – but as sales coaching.  Here’s what it said:

    If your coach is talking about any of the pitching flaws that you see listed above…

    Run… Run Fast!

    That Coach is working on “flaws” that will have no impact on your pitching.  He is working on symptoms… not the illness!  He is trying to fix things that are happening as a byproduct of incorrect movement early in your delivery. If you get the first second of your delivery right, almost all of these flaws get fixed instantly. 

    Do you know how this applies to sales? 

    I’ll explain exactly how it applies and I promise you will be surprised!  Click here to read last year’s fun article comparing pitcher’s fielding practice (PFP) to role-playing in sales.

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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:

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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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  • Has Buying Changed and Has B2B Selling Adapted?

    • January 5, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today’s buyers are self-educated and salespeople mistake that knowledge for readiness. Salespeople tend to take the path of least resistance and the knowledge they mistake for readiness lulls them into the quote, proposal and order taking mode.  As a result, they don’t follow their company’s sales process or worse, the company’s sales process has been modified to reflect buyers being ready.  If the buyers were truly ready at this point they would actually buy but the additional options prolong instead of shorten the sales process.

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  • How to Prepare for the Coming Sales Team Super Storm

    • September 22, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    My first reaction was that this must have been something from 2016 – right before the boom that lasted until the pandemic slammed the economy to the ground.  Or, from the 4th quarter of 2020, when we expected the economy to come roaring back.  But it simply can’t be something that is remotely relevant to what we are about to experience.  Here’s what we know, and how that will impact companies and their sales teams in 2022.

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  • Follow This Advice to Schedule More Meetings and Spend Less Time Doing It

    • August 25, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Regular readers know that I’m all about the data and I have written nearly two thousand articles based on data from Objective Management Group’s (OMG) assessments of more than two million salespeople.  Occasionally however, I see data where incorrect conclusions have been reached and like the toad on the window, my conclusions run counter to theirs.  One such example is a beautiful infographic from sales playbook company Xant. I am going to share some of their data, graphics and conclusions and I’ll provide my counter argument to their conclusions.

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  • Siri Can’t Help You Close the Deal but Doing These Three Things Can!

    • August 9, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sometimes Siri doesn’t actively listen and decides to send you somewhere different from where you asked her to navigate; a different city or town and/or a place that doesn’t sound remotely close to what you asked for. She gets in the way.

    So what do you do when Siri isn’t cooperating?  Do you give up and wing it?  Do you try again?  Do you stop navigating with Siri and switch to Google, Waze or your built-in system?  Do you persist until you get what you need?

    That’s exactly what salespeople are supposed to do.  Get creative, be persistent and find a way to reach the decision maker.  You do it with Siri, so why don’t you do it when someone in the company won’t introduce you to the decision maker, when they won’t give you the decision maker’s name or when they don’t cooperate?  Why do so many salespeople give up and plow forward with the contact they are speaking with right now?

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