Dave Kurlan

  • Top Recommended Personality Assessments for Sales

    • January 9, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    My Chrome home page often displays articles that Google thinks I might be interested in. Red Sox, Patriots, politics, software applications, gadgets, and for the first time, sales assessments!  I thought, “Is this for real?”

    read more

  • Can Malcom Gladwell Explain the Sales Hiring Problem?

    • January 4, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    For the sales leaders who claim they trust their gut, this book and its many examples demonstrates that there is no such thing as accurate gut instinct.  Like a coin flip, you’ll be right half the time.  So what can companies do to improve on these odds?  Assessments.

    Consider these statistics from several sources:

    read more

  • The Latest Perspective on My Most Popular Article on Selling

    • December 20, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    During a first sales call, suppose your salespeople hear one prospect say, “This has been a very interesting and productive conversation and we might have some interest in this.”  And imagine another prospect at the same meeting says, “We’ll get back to you next month and let you know what kind of progress we’ve made.”  And still a third might say, “In the meantime, please send us a proposal with references and timeline.”

    read more

  • The Top 10 Sales and Sales Leadership Articles of 2022

    • December 12, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Criteria: Popularity (views) is nice but quality of content is nicer.  Likes are cool but engagement is cooler. Entertainment value counts and my opinion matters because I’m judging the articles.  In the end, I’m applying popularity, quality of the content, likes, entertainment, comments, engagement and my opinion to create this list of the top 10 articles.

    Enjoy!

    read more

  • The Connection Between Road Signs, Sales Data, Consultative Selling and Sales Recruiting

    • December 6, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Salespeople who are learning to take a consultative approach to selling hear a stated issue – the consultative selling version of a road sign – but think they have arrived at their destination – the compelling reason to buy.

    This is supported by the data.  Objective Management Group (OMG) has data on 2,280,260 salespeople that have been assessed from more than 30,000 companies.  The findings are horrific:

    read more

  • “Spirited” Has So Much in Common with Most Salespeople

    • November 29, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Only 13% of all salespeople take a consultative approach to selling and almost none of them can be found in the bottom 50% – the group that fails to meet quota each year.  A coincidence? On the other end of the spectrum, the top 10% of all salespeople are 4300% more likely to have the Consultative Seller competency as a strength!

    read more

  • 5 Reasons Sales Teams Underperform Like My Old Wiper Blades

    • November 17, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I speak with a lot of CEOs and Sales Leaders from companies whose sales teams are underperforming.  One thing they seem to have in common is the mileage problem.  When I ask how long the sales team has been underperforming, it is usually the equivalent of 60,000 miles.  It’s not a new problem, the signs have been there for YEARS but something recently changed to the extent that they couldn’t tolerate it any longer.  The sales team’s performance was finally presenting a threat (safety) whereby one or more of revenue, earnings, sustainability, personal income, stock prices, turnover, market share, morale and more were at risk.

    What causes executives to wait so long?  Here are five potential reasons:

    read more

  • The Wall Street Journal Shares News About What it Takes to Succeed in Sales

    • November 14, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’m not anti-Wall Street Journal – at least I wasn’t.  I haven’t written about their articles before. After all, they aren’t known for writing the kind of crap that the Harvard Business Review  writes with regard to sales and selling.   

    While reviewing the article, I identified two themes – how much harder it is to sell today versus years ago and how millennials have adapted to changing times.

    read more

  • Can a New Sales Manager Be a Difference Maker?

    • November 9, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I speak with so many sales leaders who tell me about the four sales managers they went through in the last two years.  I speak with CEOs who tell me about the three sales VPs they went through in the last eighteen months.

    There is tremendous pressure to fill these roles because your team’s performance will suffer without someone at the helm.  Or is that misinformation?  How much worse could a team perform than how they perform under a sucky sales manager?

    read more

  • New Data: Will Salespeople Hit Quota When Sales Managers Coach and Sell?

    • November 7, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Instead of spending their time on coaching, sales managers are spending too much of their time on personal sales.  Sales managers with fewer than 5 salespeople may be required to carry a quota but generally speaking, sales managers are expected to spend no more than 5% of their time selling. OMG’s data shows that the percentage of time that sales managers sell is closer to 13%.

    Why do they sell instead of having more coaching conversations?  There are several reasons:

    read more