Relationship Selling

  • The Impact of Relationship Building Challenges in Sales

    • August 28, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    parenthood

    My wife and I recently finished streaming Parenthood, whose theme song was Forever Young, by Bob Dylan.  Despite my enjoyment of the series, the theme song hit me like nails on a chalkboard.  I cringed every time I heard it.

    It explains a lot about intangibles in selling.

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  • 15 Things Salespeople Must Do to Make up for a Lackluster 2nd Quarter

    • August 12, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week we moved our son into his dorm to begin his freshman year of college. The college President’s opening remarks were virtual, so we joined the Zoom stream from our hotel room and listened in.  He had some really useful things to share with the new freshmen and while his thoughts were targeted to the students, they apply quite equally to salespeople.

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  • The 14 Lies Preventing Salespeople From Getting Their Prospects into a Buying State of Mind

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

    Let’s cover some of the lies being told to companies with sales organizations and how those lies prevent sales organizations from being their best.  Over the past 10-20 years, we have seen and heard the following proclamations (and you can find most of them with this Google search link:

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  • The Top 8 Requirements for Becoming a Great Salesperson

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

    Do you remember the moment you became a Salesperson?  Not a presenter, Not an order taker, but a true consultative sales professional?

    Here are some guidelines to identify the moment you turned professional. 

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  • New Data Shows How Relationships and the Need to be Liked Impact Sales Performance

    • June 4, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In my most recent article, I shared data that showed a chain reaction would occur when salespeople have more than one major weakness in their Sales DNA and the second major weakness is their tendency to become emotional. As a trigger, the first major weakness causes the salesperson to become emotional, at which time their listening skills become compromised.

    That article can be found here and as of this writing nearly 6 dozen LinkedIn subscribers have contributed some very insightful comments here.  Their comments inspired me to dig even further and look into the correlation between relationship building that salespeople do and their need to be liked.  In this study, even I was surprised by what I found!

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  • Surprising New Data on Salespeople Busts the Myths about Relationship Selling and Social Selling

    • June 16, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I had a theory about salespeople, but didn’t have the data to prove it out.  I believed that social selling was a godsend to those in sales who were not great at relationship building – that by utilizing applications like LinkedIn and Twitter, they could reach out to new people, but with the benefit of hiding behind the glass screen. Do you think I was right?  Or wrong?

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  • What is the Best Sales Process for Increasing Sales?

    • July 14, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Companies have terrific results when they implement Baseline Selling, and last week a well-known expert asked, “What is the big secret that makes Baseline Selling so powerful?”  He thought it would make for a great article discussion, so let’s attempt to answer that question by starting with a few questions of my own.

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  • Some Truths (You May Not Like) About Relationship Selling

    • November 4, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    There are 4 possible relationship scenarios:

    Strong relationship and you have the business. 
    Strong relationship, but you don’t have the business.
    Lack of relationship and you have the business. 
    Lack of relationship and you don’t have the business. 

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  • Sales Management Best Practices – Are Top Salespeople Challengers?

    • April 29, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I don’t promote an approach based on either Relationships or Solution Selling, but both must be incorporated into an appropriate sales approach.  Also worth noting, the approach or methodology is only one part of selling.  Without a sales process and a sales model, no methodology will work very well on its own.

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