Baseline Selling
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Crucial Selling Take Aways from the 2017 Home Run Derby Lead to Sales Greatness
- July 12, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Did you watch the Home Run Derby on Monday night? I’ve never seen anything like it. You could see thunder and lightening through the glass wall in left field as thunderstorms raged while all the home runs were being launched. Wow, what a show! Of course, my mind always looks for a correlation to selling and there are some good ones here.
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7 Powerful Exercises to Up Your Sales to the Next Level
- May 8, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today, I received yet another request asking if I would recommend how to use the exercises in the Baseline Field Guide with the book, Baseline Selling. In an effort to help everyone, and not just those who choose to write me, my recommendations on some powerful ways to correlate the two appear below.
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Is it Your Salespeople or Did You Make a Bad Decision?
- October 19, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Salesforce.com.
Consider this quote from a client:
“You were right, you know. Six months ago, when you told us that we wouldn’t be happy with the integration of the customized sales process into Salesforce.com, we didn’t understand what you meant. But now we do. It’s clunky, not really part of the interface, the customization cost us tens of thousands of dollars, and it doesn’t work the way we need it to. We are so sorry we didn’t listen because that train has left the station.”
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Remembering The Most Powerful Sales Lesson of My Life
- September 6, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Which one thing helps almost every salesperson succeed, even when they have other challenges?
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What Sales Managers Do That Make Them So Ineffective
- July 26, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Earlier this week I wrote an article on why so many sales managers are so bad. In today’s article, I’ll share what makes them so ineffective. The easiest way to explain this is to start with a baseball analogy.
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Sales Process – It’s All about the Shoes, Silly
- June 28, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve written dozens of articles on Sales Process an you can read many of them right here. If you pay attention, you can even see how my thinking has changed over the last 10 years. While I have never wavered on the importance of sales process, I have modified my thinking on why it’s so important, what it must consist of, how it should work, and how it should be integrated into CRM.
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Why This is Still a Great Selling Sales Book After 10 Years
- January 28, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Pete Caputa, VP at Hubspot, wrote a really great article about the 3 sales books that are must-reads for salespeople, why, and Baseline Selling was one of the three.
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Achieve More Accurate Forecasts and Sales Results Today
- November 12, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week, a new client was explaining how he called several of the nearly 300 opportunities that one salesperson had in his pipeline. My client identified 7 opportunities that had no recent activity, but had been in the pipeline for several months and were supposed to close. Imagine my client’s surprise when:
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Leading a Sales Force is Even More Like Baseball
- November 6, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve written plenty about the similarity betwen baseball and selling, but today I’m writing about the similarity between baseball and sales leadership. If you’re not a baseball person, you might not see the same things that I see, most of which can be applied to leading a sales force. For example,
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How Stealing 2nd Base is Today’s Secret to Success in Sales
- June 16, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The count on the batter was 2-1 and it was time for a desperate fourth chat. This time, I demanded, with dire consequences (that I won’t reveal here), that he steal. He went. The catcher threw and he was safe at 2nd and the run scored. A momentary victory in the game within the game. A play that will change him, even though it wouldn’t change the eventual outcome of the game.
This morning, thinking about that play again, I’m reminded of two selling scenarios that are nearly identical.