accurate sales assessment
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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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How Companies Routinely Short Change Their Own Sales Force
- November 10, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Early on, their salespeople succeeded at selling to the low hanging fruit – the people that raised their hands because they needed or wanted the product. When the salespeople run out of low hanging fruit, sales stall as they struggle to convert prospects who see the product as nice to have, but not must have. That’s when most companies change gears and begin to innovate and invest in their product when in fact, they really need to innovate and invest in their sales force.
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Increase Odds of Successful Sales Hire by 368%
- November 6, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A Harvard Business Review study proved that using pre-employment assessments increased the probability of a successful hire from 13% to 72%.
I read that exact statement in a marketing promo for a search company and as they hoped, it got my attention. I thought the premise would make for a good article. I began by searching Google for the source of that quote and low and behold, I couldn’t locate it. I can’t say for sure that the study doesn’t exist or the percentages aren’t correct but I could not find a single thing that correlated to that quote.
Of course it makes sense that no such statistic exists
because with assessments making that much of a difference, it would be a no-brainer for every company to use them and on what planet are the chances of success only 13%?
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4 Reasons Why Salespeople Suck at Consultative Selling.
- September 26, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, a sales manager I was coaching asked me to explain the difference between a great question and a tough question. I gave him the one-minute version but this article has the expanded version of that answer.
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New Analysis Shows the 5 Biggest Gaps Between Top and Bottom Sales Performers
- May 1, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It didn’t take very long for this to happen. When Objective Management Group (OMG) announced that it was making its findings data available to the public, we knew that it wouldn’t take long for someone with a flair for analytics to dig in and come up with something cool. Last week, John Cousineau, creator of Amacus, got me on a video conference and shared what he came up with. Hint: Another way to differentiate top performers.
He
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Which Salespeople are Easier to Train – Millennials or Veteran Salespeople?
- April 19, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We brought home a puppy and we had him completely housebroken in 4 days. He’s really smart and we’ve done this before, a combination that makes it nearly impossible to screw up. To see him go to the door and touch it with his little paw, whimper when he is in his crate, go outside and do his business, and run back to the door is great. But it got me wondering, why is training a puppy relatively fast and easy while it is so much harder and takes so much longer to train salespeople?
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The Official 2017 List of 21 Sales Core Competencies
- March 15, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
These days, changes happen faster than ever and the same can be said about professional selling. Selling is evolving, the rules of business are changing, there is more information available on line than there was last week and sales organizations must evolve accordingly.
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Not the 3 Most Important Sales Hiring Attributes
- October 24, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One topic that never gets stale is how to make sure that you nail sales selection. Whether or not salespeople actually fail, or they simply stick around, but fail to have an impact, the common theme is still failure to select the right salespeople. Recently, I stumbled upon this article about 3 Uncoachable Sales Attributes that you should focus on to get hiring right.
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Will This Sales Candidate Really Fail If We Hire Him?
- October 26, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When it says Not Recommended, you really need to believe the science behind the recommendation – if you dare to hire one of these candidates 75% of them will fail inside of 6 months.