Search Results

  • Are Millennials Who Enter Sales Better or Worse Than the Rest of the Sales Population?

    • August 31, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Millennials are more independent, more spoiled, have a shorter attention span, tend to be more into their technology than into people, don’t like working traditional hours, and don’t enjoy working in traditional ways.  That said, would you expect them to be better or worse suited for selling than the generations who came before them?

    I took to the data to see what story it might tell. I found data on more than 43,000 millennials in sales and here is what I learned.  This information should be very helpful for hiring new salespeople and developing them as well.

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  • HBR or OMG – Whose Criteria Really Differentiate the Top and Bottom 10% of Salespeople?

    • August 22, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In their June 20, 2016 article, A Portrait of the Overperforming Salesperson, HBR identified several traits, attitudes and actions that they claim differentiate the top from bottom performers.  I’ll summarize it for you below and then explain why I believe it is junk.  The findings include:

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  • Those Who Follow Sales Best Practices Don’t Necessarily Become Top Performers

    • June 24, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You’ll regularly find me writing about the science – the data – that differentiates top sales performers from the bottom.  But today, I’ll move into the world from which everyone else in this space operates – anecdotal evidence and opinions. 

    I will cite two sources for this article:

    The 130 sales consulting firms that partner with me at Objective Management Group (OMG) and provide our award-winning sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments;
    The tens of thousands of salespeople, sales managers and sales leaders that I have personally trained.

    In both groups of people I have noticed a few things that are common to the tops and not so much the bottoms and I’m certain that if you paid attention, you would recognize some of the same patterns in your organization.

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  • The One Sales Data Point That Varies Wildly

    • June 13, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In my last article, we discussed big data and big lies in the sales assessment space and touched on OMG’s 230,000,000 data points.  Most of the data points are very consistent across cultures and continents, but there is one that varies wildly depending on the role, the country, and the culture.

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  • Big Data and Big Lies Have Arrived in the Sales Training and Assessment Space

    • June 3, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Yesterday I received an email that you might have received too.  It was a promotion from Top Sales World (TSW) to download a “Free Big Data-Driven Sales Training Report for Your Industry.”  TSW was simply the messenger in this case, with the provider being The Sales Board.  Like many of you, I clicked through and saw that their report was based on their assessments.  And this is where it got really interesting for me!  Their website read an awful lot like OMG’s – only the numbers were very different…

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  • Choose Which of These Two Assessments are More Predictive of Sales Success

    • February 10, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This week, a candidate for a sales position sent along his Predictive Index (PI) assessment so that we could compare it to his sales assessment from Objective Management Group (OMG).  Most people have little sense as to how assessments compare to each other – and even more have experience only with personality and behavioral styles assessments.  I was able to extract the dashboard from OMG’s 21 page sales-specific assessment, and the graphics and selling summary from the 3-page Predictive Index behavioral styles assessment.  You might find the comparison interesting!

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  • Learn How We Discovered They Had the Wrong Salespeople

    • February 1, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Would you believe me if I told you that in a recent sales force evaluation, nearly 50% of the 300 inside salespeople were not in the right role?  Recently, we evaluated a large inside sales force and I thought it might be interesting to share some of the more unusual findings that were responsible for this sales team’s inability to achieve the revenue goals that the company expected from them.

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  • Sales Selection Experiment – Part 2 – It’s Back!

    • January 13, 2016
    • Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When our son was just beginning to speak and we did something that he really enjoyed, he would say, “Again!  Again!”  

    Two years ago, I wrote about a sales selection experiment with a group of college kids and the results were so much fun to read that when they repeated the exercise this year, my first reaction was, “Again!”  I think you’re going to really enjoy the conclusions from this year’s class!

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  • What’s Missing from the Report That Says Sales Training Doesn’t Make Reps Better?

    • January 6, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I could not believe my eyes when I read this report.  It was during the break between Christmas and New Years, so perhaps I wasn’t as sharp as would be during a regular business day.  Maybe I missed something.  So I reread the report and the words amazed me even further.  The report claimed that salespeople don’t improve their skills as a result of sales training.  Really?  Let’s take a look.

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  • Five Great Lessons That Apply to Every Company That Hires Salespeople

    • November 2, 2015
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I turned sixty years old today and everyone is asking me how it feels to be sixty. To be honest, it feels exactly the same as it felt to be fifty-nine – which is essentially the same as it felt to be 40. Nothing has changed. And speaking of nothing changing, nothing has changed over at BigBrains where two updates have come my way. The first came from someone who knows the real identity of BigBrains and suggested that I refer to them as ShitForBrains instead. She must have met them!

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