crm

  • 20 Ways Salespeople Waste Time and Lose Money

    • August 31, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    garden hole

    I was thinking about how salespeople chase their tails and waste time that could be better utilized on actual selling activities.   Here are the first twenty time-wasting tail-chasing things that came to mind and they all reflect some degree of lack of commitment, lack of discipline, lack of consistency and excuse making:

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  • Is Sales Today Nothing More than its Tech Stack?

    • August 9, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    sales tech stack

    If you are on the sales team in any function, focus on selling and ignore the noise and distractions of anything that isn’t directly helping you develop your skills to book more meetings, improve your ability to reach decision makers, build relationships and trust, take a consultative approach, sell value, qualify and close business.  

    To everything else simply say “fuck off.”

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  • Top Salespeople are 8600% Better at This Than Weak Salespeople

    • January 20, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    As you can see from the table above right, the top 5% of all salespeople are 56% stronger at qualifying than strong salespeople, 452% stronger than serviceable salespeople, and 8600% stronger than the bottom 50%.  8600% Stronger!!!!  Who says qualifying isn’t important?  See how your industry/salespeople compare.

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  • 5 Steps to Grow Sales by 33% in 12 Months

    • May 11, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sales teams go through periods like this too but sales leaders rarely seek out the data that would immediately point to the real problem.  They tend to hope things will improve and go from there. However, there are several levels of data to be reviewed so let’s take a look.

    As the article title suggests, there are five steps you must take to grow sales by 33% in 12 months.  You can’t pick and choose as all five are required.

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  • Has Buying Changed and Has B2B Selling Adapted?

    • January 5, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today’s buyers are self-educated and salespeople mistake that knowledge for readiness. Salespeople tend to take the path of least resistance and the knowledge they mistake for readiness lulls them into the quote, proposal and order taking mode.  As a result, they don’t follow their company’s sales process or worse, the company’s sales process has been modified to reflect buyers being ready.  If the buyers were truly ready at this point they would actually buy but the additional options prolong instead of shorten the sales process.

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  • Salesenomics – Many Sales Organizations Are Stuck in the 1980’s

    • November 22, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When was the last time you saw a black and white television or even a console color TV?

    How about an electric typewriter?

    Or a car that didn’t have anti-lock brakes?

    You would have to return to the 1980’s to see those things and when it comes to their operations, some sales organizations are still in the 1980’s.

    For example, check out these statistics from OMG’s evaluations of 30,000 sales teams and more than two million salespeople.

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  • Most Sales Processes, Funnels and Pipelines are How Old?

    • September 29, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I was looking for an image of a sales funnel and couldn’t believe what I found!  My search results can be found here.  Can you believe all of those images of sales funnels?  Look them over and see if you can recognize the  problem with all of them.

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  • FOX News and CNN Can Help You Conduct Better Sales Opportunity Reviews

    • August 17, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I don’t really care whether or not you like, approve of, tolerate, or agree with President Trump and/or the issues he stands for.  Doesn’t matter to me.  And you shouldn’t care what I think of him or which side of that invisible center line I am on.  Shouldn’t matter to you.  While this is an article about coaching salespeople, I am going to use the current divisiveness as an analogy to help you better understand how sales leaders can have a huge impact on your salespeople.

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  • How to Achieve Sales Mastery – A Collection of Loosely Connected Thoughts

    • July 6, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    During our first of its kind Independence Day weekend, I thought about a lot of things that loosely tied into sales effectiveness and while they could all be articles in their own right, I decided to write one article tying them all together.

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  • Salespeople in Small Companies are 43% Better at This and Other Salesenomics Insights

    • January 7, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You seek out the best products, best stores, best websites and best experiences.  Doesn’t it make sense to wonder about where you can find the best salespeople?

    I asked Objective Management Group’s (OMG) COO, John Pattison, to dig into some of our data from the evaluations of 1,932,059 salespeople from  companies and provide me with some scores.

    I reviewed the data and have a number of very interesting and surprising Salesenomics conclusions to share.

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