cold call
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How To Double Your Sales Pipeline in 30 Days
- March 31, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most salespeople who entered sales more than fifteen years ago and had to prospect for new business, have forgotten how to do it and if we are being honest, may not have been very willing or effective at this when they were expected to prospect.
Most new salespeople never had to make cold calls as that was delegated to BDRs and SDRs who have universally sucked at prospecting, averaging just 1.5 new meetings scheduled per week.
Yes, it’s that bad.
What’s worse is that most companies don’t consider pipeline quantity and quality the biggest challenge in the sales organization! Most would say it’s the low win rate or the percentage of opportunities that stall in the pipeline. Why do you think that is?
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How to Get Ready for Quota-Busting Sales Success
- January 18, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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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: