need to be liked

  • Siri Can’t Help You Close the Deal but Doing These Three Things Can!

    • August 9, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sometimes Siri doesn’t actively listen and decides to send you somewhere different from where you asked her to navigate; a different city or town and/or a place that doesn’t sound remotely close to what you asked for. She gets in the way.

    So what do you do when Siri isn’t cooperating?  Do you give up and wing it?  Do you try again?  Do you stop navigating with Siri and switch to Google, Waze or your built-in system?  Do you persist until you get what you need?

    That’s exactly what salespeople are supposed to do.  Get creative, be persistent and find a way to reach the decision maker.  You do it with Siri, so why don’t you do it when someone in the company won’t introduce you to the decision maker, when they won’t give you the decision maker’s name or when they don’t cooperate?  Why do so many salespeople give up and plow forward with the contact they are speaking with right now?

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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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  • The 21-Day Solution for the Toughest Sales Weaknesses

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

    I wrote a popular article called, How the Rubber Band Sabotages Sales Performance.  That article discussed six competencies specific to Sales DNA and the impact those six have on performance when they appear as weaknesses.  At the end of last week’s article, I promised to introduce a solution to you within a week and true to my promise, the solution follows.

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  • Salespeople With This Weakness Score 47% Worse at Reaching Decision Makers

    • October 16, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A lot of the salespeople I coach have a weakness in their Sales DNA – their need to be liked.  Approximately 58% of all salespeople have this weakness and on average, salespeople score 76% in that competency.  Elite salespeople have an average score of 87% and weak salespeople have an average score of 69%.

    What would it look like if we were to pivot this data and look only at the group who have it as a weakness?  When we filter the results by the need to be liked, there are some very interesting scores.  Could it be that the need to be liked – by itself – is a predictor of sales success?  Maybe.  We know that if the salesperson is in an account management role, the need to be liked is an asset.  However, in any kind of producer role, especially in a consultative process or methodology, it will get in the way.  Take a look at this data!

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  • Latest Data – Strong Salespeople Score 375% Better Than Weak Salespeople

    • July 18, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Some of you might have seen Bryce Harper’s incredible last-minute barrage of home runs in the 2018 All-Star game. It’s one of the highlights of summer!  Today I give you a barrage of my own with three killer videos and a powerful data-packed article.  

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  • New Data Shows Sales Weaknesses Cause Powerful Chain Reactions in Salespeople

    • May 30, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I have written extensively about Sales DNA over the years and today we will view Sales DNA from the perspective of sitting inside of a chemistry lab.

    Sales DNA is the combination of strengths (or weaknesses) that support (or sabotage) the execution of sales process, sales strategy and sales tactics.  Objective Management Group (OMG) measures and includes the 6 most powerful of those strands of Sales DNA in its 21 Sales Core Competencies.  While I usually discuss the impact of these weaknesses, we have never conducted a lab experiment like this before! 

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  • Holiday Sales Treat – A Mashup of Two Classic Songs

    • December 6, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This past weekend I read that the lyrics to the popular Christmas song, “Baby it’s Cold Outside” were rewritten to emphasize consent.  And the weekend before I saw the news that Brady Bunch Mom, Florence Henderson, had passed away.  That immediately caused the Brady Bunch theme song to come to mind but my brain tends to combine things. In 2005, when I combined sales and baseball,  it became Baseline Selling, which when I looked as I was writing this, was still ranked #9 in the sales category on Amazon.com.  So my brain went and combined the Brady Bunch Theme song with a lyric change and came up with this diddy on OMG.

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