sales candidates
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What Does Sales Longevity Really Mean?
- September 9, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Objective Management Group has included the Sales Longevity Finding for about a year and clients still ask, “What does it really mean?”
It’s really 3 things:
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What’s the Difference Between Sales Commitment and Motivation?
- September 8, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
“Which is more important in sales – commitment or motivation?”
Let’s discuss the difference first.
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What Makes Salespeople Stand Out from the Crowd?
- July 28, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Great salespeople are a jigsaw puzzle with each data point representing just one piece, not the whole picture. And nothing connects more of the pieces of the puzzle than a customized, sales specific OMG sales candidate assessment.
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Can Sales Candidate Assessments Drive Results?
- May 13, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
They claimed that salespeople who scored highest on their assessments had 69% higher close rates. That’s impressive, right? But their assessment didn’t drive the results. Those salespeople drove the results. Their assessment simply indicated that those salespeople would be more successful. That is what an assessment is supposed to do! They could just as easily said, “Our assessments do what they’re supposed to do!”
So let’s take a closer look at a 69% higher close. It means that if the salespeople with a lower score close 1 of every 10 opportunities, then the strong salespeople, who scored highest on the assessment, will close 69% more of their 10 opportunities, or 1.69. It’s not nearly as impressive as it sounds, is it?
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How Many Salespeople Made Quota in 2010?
- February 21, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This study is basically saying that during one of the worst recessions ever, an all-time high percentage of salespeople hit their numbers. I don’t buy it and here’s why.
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Case History – Read the Latest Sales Assessment to Come to Life
- February 10, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The lesson here is that you don’t want people like this working for you! It doesn’t matter that they can hunt. They will blow up every prospect who they think could be rejecting them!
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Sales Performance – Does it Correlate with First Impressions?
- February 7, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Let me talk about the first impressions and the follow up thoughts I had on 3 candidates.
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How Four Variations Influence Sales and the Way People Make Decisions
- January 26, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My regular readers know that I fall on the side of science, but the other three types of commenters feel so strongly about their positions that you would think they were talking science too. It’s great when many people chime in with their comments. That’s the beauty of a discussion forum or Blog – everyone gets to participate and weigh in. But in the case of a question where its author expects an answer based on science, it becomes more difficult to separate opinions from experiences, gut instincts and facts. Regardless of the type of comment offered, they all believe their comments to be factual.
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Did Your Salespeople Choose to Be in Sales?
- January 5, 2011
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Even if you reviewed as many resumes as I do each week you might not notice this: Most sales candidates did not have a sales position as their first job after college. Most started as something else and then, out of the blue, they were in sales, sales management, marketing, or business development. I always get suspicious when somewhere back in time a candidate went from Purchasing to Sales Management and never sold along the way…
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Selling Power Hit and Then Miss the Mark on Sales
- November 17, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday it was the Harvard Business Review article and today it’s a Selling Power article.
They pointed to three qualities that are highly predictive indicators of a top sales performer. Let’s see how their claims (using data from personality assessments) stack up against real sales science (using Objective Management Group’s data from sales specific assessments).
They said the 3 highly predictive qualities are: