prospecting
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My Key to Building a Strong, Sustainable, Sales Pipeline
- April 16, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Building a strong, sustainable pipeline requires not only commitment and discipline from salespeople, it also requires commitment and discipline from their sales leaders who cannot allow them to give up, give in, or take short cuts. While excellence involves advanced sales training skills, extended practice sessions and coaching, the desire to improve is the most important element.
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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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Getting Salespeople to Prospect When They Aren’t Prospecting
- November 15, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While some growth can be expected to come from effective account management, the kind of growth desired by most companies comes from consistently finding and closing new accounts. While companies love their inbound lead-generation programs, and those programs do generate leads, the quality of the leads, and the quality of the meetings booked by those young and inexperienced top-of-funnel kids, leaves much to be desired.
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Trump, The Iowa Caucus, and Sales Improvement
- January 16, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This course is the most fun you could ever have while going through sales training! But it is so much more than fun and entertainment. There are powerful selling lessons in each clip, and despite the fun, you will become more effective at all aspects of selling. It doesn’t matter how long you have been in sales, what you sell, who you sell it to, the length of your sales cycle or the cost of your product or service. Nor does it matter where your competency gaps are.
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The Best Sales and Sales Leadership Content of 2023
- December 11, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Welcome to my annual list of the best sales and sales leadership content of 2023. This year’s list has thirteen entries, including articles, videos, and LinkedIn posts. There are several categories including Most Read, Most Liked, Most Engagement, Best Quality and Personal Favorite. Ready?
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My Latest on Using Email to Book New Meetings
- November 29, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Salespeople have been spoiled by inbound leads, outbound emails, and BDRs generating leads for them. As a result, those in sales for fewer than ten years never learned how and suck at cold calling. Those who used to cold call but have since stopped, forgot how to and also suck at cold calling.
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The Bob Chronicles – The Difference Between Selling Skills and Effectiveness
- October 12, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today a client asked me to explain the difference between skills and effectiveness. You won’t find the answer by doing a Google search as that search turns up exactly nothing on the subject. This article will discuss the similarity between symptoms/causes and skills/effectiveness. Do you remember Bob, the subject of many articles and my favorite weak salesperson to write about?
Bob strikes again!
I’ve written 10 articles about Bob and everyone says that the Bob series is their favorite.
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The Many Different Selling Roles and How They Differ – Part 1
- July 27, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The same kind of thinking is required when thinking about the various roles of salespeople. We can name them: Account Executive, Territory Manager, Business Development Rep, Sales Development Rep, Account Manager, Key Account Manager, National Account Manager, Channel Manager, Application Engineer, Sales Consultant, Inside Sales, Outside Sales, and more.
To further complicate things, in some companies and industries, Sales Managers function as salespeople and Sales VPs function as Sales Managers.
While the above roles have selling as a primary responsibility, there are as many differences to selling roles as there are differences to the class or style of cars. Today, we’ll explore the difference between an Account Executive and a Business Development Rep.
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The Cold Email I Read Through to the End – Is There Hope for Salespeople and Marketers?
- February 22, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sunday I received a cold email, generated using AI that was actually personalized. Not with just my name, but it included information about my company, where I attended college and more. While I still have no interest or need for the service being pitched, I actually read it instead of deleting it. Here’s what it said: