closing

  • Predict the Weather but Control the Sales Forecast and Revenue

    • June 6, 2017
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You may be familiar when the rant sounds like: “It’s almost the end of the quarter, we’re only at 65% of forecast, the pipeline is half empty, and nothing is closing. With the exception of 3 nice deals that came in during May, our salespeople have sucked.” 

    While the crappy weather and your crappy 2nd quarter revenue have crappy in common, there is one huge difference that can help you hit your sales forecast even when the weather forecast is for rain.

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  • Sales Success is Like Making Great Tasting Soup

    • November 3, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sales success is no more about any one competency than great-tasting soup is about one ingredient.  If you omit one ingredient, like salt, the soup will taste bland.  If you omit one competency, like Qualifying, your sales effectiveness will suffer.  While you can’t leave one ingredient out of the soup, it’s also not possible to make soup by focusing on and including only one ingredient.  Likewise, with sales, you can’t expect to succeed, dominate your market, and celebrate your results if you focus on and include only one of the competencies on my list.  

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  • Every Sales Assessment Tells a Story – This is Fred’s Story

    • December 19, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When his boss couldn’t understand why Fred wasn’t performing, we performed a sales force evaluation and among the things we focused in on was Fred.

    Fred’s Sales DNA was generally quite good but when it came to his selling skills, there were a few problems that explained everything.

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  • Top 11 Reasons Why Salespeople Fail to Close Sales

    • September 19, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The reason I’m bringing this up is that in most companies, when certain stages of the sales process are not being exectued as they should, executives often don’t know why.  That’s one of the many reasons why we evaluate Sales Forces – to identify root causes of the known (and unknown) problems.  

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  • Most Salespeople Suck at Selling – Is it Worse Than Ever?

    • August 26, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    What is your approach to get people to call you back after you have left 2 or 3 messages?”

    In the past month, there have been 47 comments, one of the most popular topics I’ve seen there.  Some of the replies have been on target but most are embarrassing to read.  These are sales management executives and this is a “what salespeople must learn to do in their 1st week in sales” topic.  Most salespeople do not have the skills to consistently get new prospects to the phone!

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  • Why the Relationship is So Important to the Sales Outcome

    • September 30, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Unfortunately, in order to ask those questions and have those discussions, a relationship must be established.  And this is where the double edged sword comes into play.  The discussion I’m talking about is a first meeting discussion.  But the relationship that requires is often a 2nd or 3rd meeting relationship.  So the problem I present is, how does one develop a late-stage relationship in an early stage meeting?

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  • How to Close the Deal that Your Salespeople Can’t Close

    • August 10, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sometimes, when your salespeople are trying to close a sale, the deal stalls, gets put-off, or simply doesn’t close.  This is followed by, well, follow up, leading to more put-offs.  There are many reasons why this happens but for the purpose of this article, let’s simply assume that the prospect has every reason to buy and the salesperson did not do anything glaringly wrong along the way.  Simply a closable opportunity that hasn’t closed yet.  In situations like this, there are usually two things going on:

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  • Top 20 Requirements – How Salespeople Can be Better at Closing

    • June 10, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If you were to ask most executives for one thing that they would like their sales force to do better, you would likely get one of two answers:

    Close
    Prospect 

    Nothing wrong with those two choices – or is there? 

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  • Why You Should be Scared When Your Salespeople are Closing Sales

    • February 10, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most senior executives get excited when a lot of business starts to close all in a fairly short period of time.  They think:

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  • The Latest Fiction for the Sales Force – No More Hunters and Farmers

    • September 10, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today I received an email from Selling Power promoting their latest webinar, The Hunter/Farmer Paradigm is Dead. 

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