sales assessment

  • Stupid Choices in the Selection of Sales Assessments

    • October 30, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    We had a conversation with someone who was using the CPQ Assessment.  The person who was providing it to them claims it is a sales assessment but it’s a personality test marketed as a sales assessment. If you’re not familiar with my series on this then click here. They were also told that it was predictive, especially with insurance salespeople, and that they could use the same criteria for selecting their salespeople (selling a business consulting package to CEO’s) as is used for hiring life insurance salespeople.

    Yeah, right.

    Let’s compare the life insurance (LI) sale and this business consulting package sale (BCP):

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  • Sales Process – 5th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies for Buildling a Sales Culture

    • October 18, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This is the 5th in my series of The 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

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  • Sales Assessment Comparison – Objective Management Group versus Devine

    • September 14, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It’s not often that we get to compare the assessment results of an individual that took our assessment and another.  Why?  Because most companies don’t use multiple assessments that report on similar findings.  Notice that I said “report on” and not “look at”. 

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  • Top Producers, Top Salespeople, or Good Account Managers?

    • August 27, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today I received an email from Selling Power promoting their latest webinar, The Hunter/Farmer Paradigm is Dead. 

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  • How to Get the Entire Sales Force to Change – Now

    • July 27, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Now lets discuss your company and the sales organization.  What have you been afraid to change?

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  • 10 Lessons From the Sales Candidate Who Smelled Like He Peed on Himself

    • July 3, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It was quite the claim.  I remember telling my client that the next candidate we were to interview was the best sounding candidate I had ever spoken with on the phone. Robert, the sales manager, went to the lobby to get the candidate and returned, an ashen look on his face.  Ray, the candidate, followed Robert into the conference room and suddenly, I had the same ashen look on my face.  It seemed that the best candidate I had ever spoken with by phone was, well, a bum!

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  • Top 6 Reasons Why Most Sales Training Doesn’t Work

    • June 25, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    If you invest in sales training, especially now, you also need it to work now, not in 12 months.  Why does it take so long for most sales training to make a difference and why does most sales training fail to make the difference you expect? There are a lot of possible reasons and I’ll attempt to explain them here.

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  • Sales Assessment Says He’s Weak but He Made President’s Club

    • June 12, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Yesterday a well meaning Sales Manager, in defense of his salesperson, asked me how a salesperson who made “Club” could possibly assess so poorly.  It’s a great question with a dozen or more possible explanations.  Here are some: 

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  • Sales Cycles and Time – Is it Running Out?

    • June 1, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    We are always focused on sales cycles.  Are they optimized?  Are they taking too long?  Can they be improved?  How many calls should they take?  Are we doing things that make the sales cycle take longer than necessary? For example, the sales cycle can be shortened in direct proportion to how high your salespeople call in the company. 

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  • Hire the Best Salespeople on the Planet

    • May 28, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Several months ago Objective Management Group began to identify hirable candidates that are ideal – they will ramp-up more quickly than a normal hirable candidate. A normal candidate should ramp up according to this formula I devised many years ago:

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