cold call

  • Follow This Advice to Schedule More Meetings and Spend Less Time Doing It

    • August 25, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Regular readers know that I’m all about the data and I have written nearly two thousand articles based on data from Objective Management Group’s (OMG) assessments of more than two million salespeople.  Occasionally however, I see data where incorrect conclusions have been reached and like the toad on the window, my conclusions run counter to theirs.  One such example is a beautiful infographic from sales playbook company Xant. I am going to share some of their data, graphics and conclusions and I’ll provide my counter argument to their conclusions.

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  • The Voicemail Message with Everything but the Kitchen Sink

    • April 18, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This week I received a voicemail message from a salesperson that literally included everything but the kitchen sink.  I don’t recall listening to a voicemail that sounded like this before.  I don’t think voicemails like this are effective.  I don’t like voicemails like this.  

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  • Perhaps Hope is a Selling Strategy After All!

    • June 9, 2017
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You’ve heard that hope is not a strategy – and it isn’t a strategy if you’re sitting there saying to yourself, “I hope I win this deal…”

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  • Have the Promises of Inbound Sales Come to Fruition?

    • November 14, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week, I spoke at Inbound, where 19,000 people attended this sold-out event in Boston.  Ironically, I spoke to a crowd that wanted to learn how to be more effective at engaging prospects by phone and converting those conversations to meetings.  Why is it ironic?  Well, the promise of the Inbound movement is that cold calling is dead. Salespeople will reap the benefits of inbound leads from prospects who had already expressed interest.  Has that happened?

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  • Prospecting Trends for the Sales Force

    • July 19, 2012
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Three salespeople left voice-mail messages for me today.  They were all cold calls, they were all bad, and they were all following up on brochures they dropped off last week.  Nothing out of the ordinary here, as one of the callers wanted to know when our copier leases expire, one wanted to know when our commercial real estate lease expires and two wanted to introduce themselves as our new reps.

    There are several reasons why they were so bad:  

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