Sales Candidate
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Case History – How Not to Hire Salespeople
- April 2, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A company wants to hire 5000 salespeople – but why?
2000 drop out before completing training, and another 2000 drop out during the first 90 days in the field. Another 500 drop out during the first 6 months, and at the end of the year they only have 500 of the original 5000 standing. What would it be worth to them from a cost, time, resources and practicality standpoint for us to simply identify, in advance, the final 500, before anyone is hired?
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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 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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Teaching Sales in School is Like Learning to Golf on the Wii
- July 29, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The article, “Can College Teach You to Sell?”, has its pros and cons. Let’s start with the good stuff.
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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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The CEO Who Needed to Hire Salespeople
- February 25, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday I spoke with a CEO who asked for some help recruiting salespeople. It seems that the salespeople they had previously hired had failed. As I learned more about their business, a few things became obvious to me:
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Exposed – Personality Tests Disguised as Sales Assessments
- January 28, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, I met with a long-time client who, in his previous company, used OMG’s Assessments to identify what needed to change in order to double revenue from $30 million to $60 million. In his new company, which is already about 12x that size, he wants to double revenue again. He said, “I just wasted two years with the _____ Assessment.” The assessment to which he referred was a personality assessment marketed as a sales assessment. It could have referred to any personality or behavioral-styles assessment.
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Identify the Perfect Sales Candidate for your Sales Force
- January 26, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Several years ago I wrote a White Paper that described both the original research as well as the ongoing research that drives our world-class, incredibly predictive, customizable sales specific candidate assessments.
When it comes to our assessments, we strive for excellence, by venturing wider and deeper than anyone else. We can be aggressive for two reasons:
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Tale of Two Assessments – Comparing Value
- December 18, 2008
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A potential client wanted to know how Objective Management Group could justify the cost of a our license (unlimited candidate assessments for one year or until the specified number of salespeople are hired) versus what seemed at face value to be a lower cost for DISC assessments.
There are several factors here but they are all worth noting.
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A Career in Sales is No Place for a….
- November 25, 2008
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I must be losing my vision because regardless of the number of times I looked, I still didn’t see Sales on the list. So here we are and the profession is still so disrespected that they don’t even want to expose high school kids to the opportunity to earn more than most of the careers listed above.