Dave Kurlan

  • How All Those Trucks on the Road Can Help You Stop Discounting

    • August 5, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I have an awful lot to say about incentives to buy!
    The occurrences are as predictable as the 6pm news beginning exactly at 6pm.  If you have opportunities in the pipeline during the last week of the month, the last week of the quarter and the last two weeks of the year, and your prospects showed a strong likelihood of moving forward, they’ll be sitting back waiting for a call from a salesperson or sales manager to sweeten the pot so that you can get this deal in before the end of whenever.  How lame.  

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  • The Best Salespeople are 791% Better at This Than Weak Salespeople

    • July 17, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The first contractor got a proposal to us within a few days, the second contractor got a proposal to us later the same day and the third contractor gave us a price on the spot.  On the responsive scale, the third contractor was the best. 

    Certainly, responsiveness is not the only criteria that prospects weigh as part of their decision-making process.    They may also consider:

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  • The Best Salespeople are 2733% More Likely to Have This Than the Worst Salespeople

    • July 11, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    86% of all salespeople have beliefs that don’t support ideal sales outcomes.  That’s important because beliefs influence behavior, and appropriate sales behavior drives results.  Think about sales process, sales methodology, sales strategy and sales tactics. Salespeople who have the ability to execute those four elements of success are less dependent on their knowledge of selling than what they believe.  While most salespeople have self-limiting beliefs, it should not surprise you that only 18% of the elite salespeople – the top 5% – have self-limiting beliefs.  But it drops off rapidly from there.  Below I have listed the percentage of salespeople with self-limiting Beliefs by performance levels.

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  • How to Transform Your Sales Pipeline Today

    • July 8, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Flower gardens can be large, colorful, impressive and calming to look at.  Unfortunately, most sales pipelines are full of weeds, not large enough, and certainly not impressive.  From its evaluations and assessments of 1,875,978 salespeople, Objective Management Group (OMG) has found that only 46% of all salespeople maintain a full pipeline.  It breaks down as follows:

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  • Putting Some Hollywood into Your Sales Presentations

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

    Last week I wrote about First Impressions and today’s topic is presentations.  That’s quite the change in direction from Consultative Selling, Sales Process, Assessments, and Performance.

    What do Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocket Man, Miracle and Argo have in common and what do they have to do with selling?

    What do Unbroken, Hunt for Red October, and A Few Good Men have in common and what is their relation to selling?

    Let’s tackle the issue of presenting your solutions to two different audiences:

    Those who are very familiar with what you have, what you do and how it works;
    Those who are unfamiliar with what you have, what you do and how it works.

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  • Your Last Chance to Make a Good First Impression

    • June 14, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most salespeople don’t take first impressions seriously enough. If they did, their first impressions would be much more favorable.

    I can still remember my first (unintentional) lesson about first impressions.  My family was gathered at my grandfather’s house to watch the debut of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show.  It was February 9, 1964 and at 8 years old, I was one of seventy-three million people watching the show that night.  I was as excited about this show as I would be later that same year when I attended my first Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park.  That is pretty excited! 

    Sitting on the carpet, I was completely focused on seeing and hearing The Beatles play five of their hit songs, but my mother was doing color commentary from the plastic covered sofa behind me.

    She said, “He’s cleaner than the other 3”, referring to Paul McCartney, who had straighter teeth, and a face more suitable for the mop top hair style shared by the four of them.

    There it was, my first lesson in judging people by how they looked, and more specifically, what “clean” did and did not look like.

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  • How to Raise the Incomes of Minimum Wage Workers Without Wealth Distribution or Socialism

    • June 5, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Minimum wage employees are forced into those low paying jobs and the wealthiest Americans are to blame.  Why can’t low hourly wage workers seek and earn better paying jobs?  Is it lack of skills?  Lack of motivation?  Lack of commitment?  Lack of education? Lack of opportunity?  Lack of training?

    Why not sales?  Selling is a profession that employs 16 million in the US alone and for most sales jobs, especially with today’s lack of candidates, there is a laundry list of qualifications that are NOT required:

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  • How to Know if You Are You Really Selling Consultatively

    • June 4, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most of the CEOs and sales leaders I speak with agree that their sales organizations need to be more effective at taking a consultative approach to selling. At the same time, they insist that they talk about it often and that their salespeople are doing OK with a consultative approach.  OMG’s Sales Force Evaluation usually reveals that they aren’t doing much more than talking about it, as their scores for the Consultative Seller competency are quite low.

    How can you determine if you or your team are being effective at using a consultative approach?  I created this list of outcomes that would be true if your consultative approach was working effectively.  You and/or your salespeople are :

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  • How Top Salespeople Anticipate and Manage Resistance

    • May 29, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week Tom Hopkins shared a post on LinkedIn that resembled what I have said so many times.  He said, “The art of selling involves two jobs: Job One is to reduce sales resistance and the other is to increase sales acceptance.”

    Many readers left comments about the importance of relationships as a means to preventing resistance from going up.

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  • 10 Reasons Why Salespeople Hallucinate

    • May 15, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I saw something that simply wasn’t there.  A figment of my imagination.  You could even call it a hallucination.

    Salespeople frequently have hallucinations where they think there is something there, like a great opportunity, and in reality, there isn’t anything there.  Not even close.  And then there are the salespeople who don’t see an opportunity when there is actually a great one hiding in plain site.

    Let’s talk about the many reasons that these scenarios occur.

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