Search Results
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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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Not The Top 20 Attributes of Successful Salespeople
- August 1, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The article was 100% junk science and to use the word science would be a disservice to the word junk. Below, you’ll find five reasons why this article was so wrong, so bad, so misleading, so pitiful, and just plain stupid:
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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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2 Selling Shortcuts That Will Always Work
- April 22, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Do shortcuts work in sales?
I can tell you that shortcuts work when you’re driving a car and need either a more direct route to your destination or a route that avoids traffic. Waze helps a lot with that!
Shortcuts work in math when you know what the formula is and how to use it.
But shortcuts in sales? Not usually. Watch this 1:30 video on sales shortcuts and then I’ll share two scenarios where shortcuts can actually be used.
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Speed Limits, the Flow of Traffic, and Sales Pipelines
- November 19, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I don’t get stressed anymore when I’m driving. All it took was for me to not exceed the speed limit. I’m not sure whether it was my navigation system repeatedly telling me to “obey all traffic laws” each time I started the car, or my wife reminding me that I needed to be a good role model for our soon-to-be driving 16 year-old son. I admit that this was much easier for me to do after I gave up my Jaguar for a Lincoln Navigator. It holds much more baseball equipment!
There is an exception to not exceeding the speed limit. When the flow of traffic in all lanes is moving exponentially faster than you are, you must increase your speed to match the flow of traffic or risk getting run over!
That brings me to pipeline flow.
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The Top 12 Factors that Cause Delayed Closings and What to Do About Them
- September 25, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Delays, delays, delays. Nearly every coaching call with a salesperson is about a delayed closing. Nearly every coaching call with a sales manager is about a salesperson with a delayed closing. Everyone wants to know what to do about the delayed closing but that’s the wrong question. Everyone should be asking these two questions instead.
Was it really delayed or were we overly optimistic about if and when this opportunity would close?
What steps can we take to prevent delayed closings? -
Elite Salespeople are 200% Better in These 3 Sales Competencies
- July 23, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Professional athletes have one trait in common – they are all very athletic and their skills are among the top several hundred in the world in their particular sport. For example, in Major League Baseball, there are 30 teams with 25 players each, making those ball players the top 750 in the world. Dig a little deeper and in each sport there is an even smaller subset of players who are all-stars
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The Perfect Day for a Salesperson – 10 Ways to be More Efficient and Effective in 2018
- December 8, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You can be more effective and more efficient selling in 2018, do every single thing I wrote about in this article, exactly as I wrote it, and without any difficulty, by making a conscious decision to follow this blueprint. It’s not hard. It’s not scary. It’s not unusual. It’s not even thought-provoking. It’s simply a list of best practices that great salespeople (top 5%) do and that crappy (46%) salespeople either don’t do consistently or don’t do it at all.
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Getting Your Calls Returned
- January 19, 2015
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Categories: Monthly Tips, Tactics - Getting to 1st Base (Appointments)
About two years ago I published this tip with the most effective way to leave a voice mail message and get it returned. Read the tip before proceeding.
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The Latest and Greatest in Sales Force Effectiveness
- January 12, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Spoiler Warning: This article is about my company and its new product. Stick around though and I think you’ll realize that it’s just as much about your company as it is mine.