Search Results
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The Most Successful Negotiation is The Negotiation That Isn’t Needed
- December 9, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This week, one company said that their terms are Net 75. I said, “I’m sorry, but we can’t solve your problem and be your bank. Our terms are due on receipt of invoice and it’s non-negotiable.”
They said, “Oh, OK.”
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How All Those Trucks on the Road Can Help You Stop Discounting
- August 5, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I have an awful lot to say about incentives to buy!
The occurrences are as predictable as the 6pm news beginning exactly at 6pm. If you have opportunities in the pipeline during the last week of the month, the last week of the quarter and the last two weeks of the year, and your prospects showed a strong likelihood of moving forward, they’ll be sitting back waiting for a call from a salesperson or sales manager to sweeten the pot so that you can get this deal in before the end of whenever. How lame. -
How to Transform Your Sales Pipeline Today
- July 8, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Flower gardens can be large, colorful, impressive and calming to look at. Unfortunately, most sales pipelines are full of weeds, not large enough, and certainly not impressive. From its evaluations and assessments of 1,875,978 salespeople, Objective Management Group (OMG) has found that only 46% of all salespeople maintain a full pipeline. It breaks down as follows:
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Your Last Chance to Make a Good First Impression
- June 14, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most salespeople don’t take first impressions seriously enough. If they did, their first impressions would be much more favorable.
I can still remember my first (unintentional) lesson about first impressions. My family was gathered at my grandfather’s house to watch the debut of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show. It was February 9, 1964 and at 8 years old, I was one of seventy-three million people watching the show that night. I was as excited about this show as I would be later that same year when I attended my first Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park. That is pretty excited!
Sitting on the carpet, I was completely focused on seeing and hearing The Beatles play five of their hit songs, but my mother was doing color commentary from the plastic covered sofa behind me.
She said, “He’s cleaner than the other 3”, referring to Paul McCartney, who had straighter teeth, and a face more suitable for the mop top hair style shared by the four of them.
There it was, my first lesson in judging people by how they looked, and more specifically, what “clean” did and did not look like.
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How to Know if You Are You Really Selling Consultatively
- June 4, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most of the CEOs and sales leaders I speak with agree that their sales organizations need to be more effective at taking a consultative approach to selling. At the same time, they insist that they talk about it often and that their salespeople are doing OK with a consultative approach. OMG’s Sales Force Evaluation usually reveals that they aren’t doing much more than talking about it, as their scores for the Consultative Seller competency are quite low.
How can you determine if you or your team are being effective at using a consultative approach? I created this list of outcomes that would be true if your consultative approach was working effectively. You and/or your salespeople are :
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How Top Salespeople Anticipate and Manage Resistance
- May 29, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week Tom Hopkins shared a post on LinkedIn that resembled what I have said so many times. He said, “The art of selling involves two jobs: Job One is to reduce sales resistance and the other is to increase sales acceptance.”
Many readers left comments about the importance of relationships as a means to preventing resistance from going up.
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The New Salesenomics
- May 24, 2019
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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The 14 Lies Preventing Salespeople From Getting Their Prospects into a Buying State of Mind
- May 17, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Let’s cover some of the lies being told to companies with sales organizations and how those lies prevent sales organizations from being their best. Over the past 10-20 years, we have seen and heard the following proclamations (and you can find most of them with this Google search link:
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Six Overlooked Factors When Hiring Salespeople
- April 11, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve been sick with my annual bout of asthmatic bronchitis – fun stuff – and the question I’ve been asking myself is, “how long will it last this year?” Historically, it’s takes 2-4 weeks for this to subside and it sucks big time during that 2-4 weeks. But thinking about time frames got me thinking about one of the universal timelines and challenges facing companies everywhere.
How long should it take for a new salesperson to become successful and why do so many of them fail?
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The 21-Day Solution for the Toughest Sales Weaknesses
- April 5, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I wrote a popular article called, How the Rubber Band Sabotages Sales Performance. That article discussed six competencies specific to Sales DNA and the impact those six have on performance when they appear as weaknesses. At the end of last week’s article, I promised to introduce a solution to you within a week and true to my promise, the solution follows.