sales assessment

  • 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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  • Six Overlooked Factors When Hiring Salespeople

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

    I’ve been sick with my annual bout of asthmatic bronchitis – fun stuff – and the question I’ve been asking myself is, “how long will it last this year?”  Historically, it’s takes 2-4 weeks for this to subside and it sucks big time during that 2-4 weeks.  But thinking about time frames got me thinking about one of the universal timelines and challenges facing companies everywhere.

    How long should it take for a new salesperson to become successful and why do so many of them fail?

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  • Data Shows 1st Year Sales Improvement of 51% in this Competency

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

    I looked at the before and after scores for eight of the 21 Sales Core Competencies as well as the Reaches Decision Makers, Account Manager and Farmer competencies for a total of 11.  See the table below:

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  • How Executives Fail to Understand the Reasons for Poor Sales and Revenue Performance

    • August 11, 2017
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I can tell you that once in a blue moon, after we evaluate a sales force and present our findings, a rare CEO can become defensive and react poorly to the results.  When it happens, it’s usually a sign that the CEO is out of touch with the sales force.  I’ll share some of the things to which they sometimes react badly:

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  • How Your Salespeople Measure Up in the 21 Most Crucial Sales Competencies for Modern Selling

    • April 4, 2017
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This is really about sales professionals who place more faith in the traits that are consistent with their beliefs, fearing that their actual capabilities won’t match up with the science.  People want to see themselves in the most popular, positive way.  They don’t want to discover that they might be lacking in 10 of the 21 Sales Core Competencies or have gaps in all 21.

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  • Are Millennials Who Enter Sales Better or Worse Than the Rest of the Sales Population?

    • August 31, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Millennials are more independent, more spoiled, have a shorter attention span, tend to be more into their technology than into people, don’t like working traditional hours, and don’t enjoy working in traditional ways.  That said, would you expect them to be better or worse suited for selling than the generations who came before them?

    I took to the data to see what story it might tell. I found data on more than 43,000 millennials in sales and here is what I learned.  This information should be very helpful for hiring new salespeople and developing them as well.

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  • The Craziest, Most Unusual Sales Selection Criteria and What Really Works

    • August 9, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It was just last month that I wrote this hugely popular article about the tech buyer who hated salespeople.  In the first paragraph I mentioned that I had a crazy case of poison ivy.  At about the one-week point, I started searching Google to find anything that might help ease the itching and discomfort. As you might guess, the remedies I found included some very crazy things that common sense would tell you to stay away from.  Well, in the 31 years I’ve been in the sales consulting business, I have heard some very crazy sales selection criteria too.  When salespeople are hired but don’t work out, executives and in some cases, entire industries, stick their head in the sand and call it normal or acceptable.  Life insurance, where turnover can run as high as 90%, is a perfect example of this.  Insurance industry executives say that it’s perfectly normal.  However, outside of the insurance industry, most executives will try just about any remedy to stop the discomfort.  Here are some of the craziest I’ve seen.

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  • 4 Critical Changes to Go from Failure to Success in Sales Today

    • July 18, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today I’m in Florida, preparing to speak at a company’s national meeting.  Like many companies, they have not only realized that selling has changed dramatically, but that their salespeople may not have adapted, developed new skills, and changed the way they sell.  If you’re a regular reader, active on LinkedIn or Social Media, then you have certainly read about the many ways that selling has changed.  But most senior executives haven’t put two and two together yet.  They know that win rates are down and sales cycles are longer, they know it’s more difficult than ever before, they see that their salespeople are struggling to meet quotas, but they don’t realize the extent to which things have changed.  There are four critical requirements which, together are the difference between success and failure.

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  • Big Data and Big Lies Have Arrived in the Sales Training and Assessment Space

    • June 3, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Yesterday I received an email that you might have received too.  It was a promotion from Top Sales World (TSW) to download a “Free Big Data-Driven Sales Training Report for Your Industry.”  TSW was simply the messenger in this case, with the provider being The Sales Board.  Like many of you, I clicked through and saw that their report was based on their assessments.  And this is where it got really interesting for me!  Their website read an awful lot like OMG’s – only the numbers were very different…

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  • What Should You Do When You or Your Company is Disliked in Sales?

    • April 11, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I know. Everyone loves you. You are just so likable that it’s inconceivable that you could be disliked. As usual, I see things a bit differently and I’ll prove that there is someone that not only dislikes you, but might even hate you. For example, my company, Objective Management Group (OMG), is universally hated by an entire vertical! I’ll share that with you, but first I must ask you a question.

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