Sales Coaching

  • Opportunity Blindness – What’s in Your Sales Pipeline?

    • February 28, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    lumps of coal or gold bullions in your pipeline

    Some observations:

    The data represents the forecast and funnel for 7 sales teams.
    The gaps (A & G) are backwards and should say 72% (A) and 41% (G).
    The quarterly forecast (C) is 58% short of the quarterly target (D).
    The current closable opportunities (B) are 77% short of the forecast (C) and 90% short of the quarterly target (D).
    Add columns G and H and together, all of those columns represent pathetic, old news.

    The question that should be asked is, “What can we do about this?”

    We should be able to answer that question by looking at column F but that’s not possible.  Can you see why?

    Outside of telling us that there isn’t enough in the funnel, the data in column F doesn’t answer the question that must always be asked:  Is the pipeline viable?

    We know the assigned value of the pipeline but we don’t know the answers to these additional ten important factors:

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  • 25 Sales Experts on the Importance of Coaching Salespeople

    • February 25, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    coaching salespeople

    Sales managers are still not coaching – at least not consistently or effectively.  As a reminder, consistent daily coaching increases revenue by 28% and when it is paired with effective coaching, revenue increases by 43%.  It’s simply incomprehensible that sales managers aren’t picking up the clue phone. 

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  • 12 Powerful Sales Lessons from “The Chosen”

    • February 6, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    12 lessons learned

    I’ve written hundreds of articles with analogies to sales using athletes, musicians, actors, CEOs, politicians, inventors, songs, movies, TV Shows and their characters and you didn’t need to be a fan of them to appreciate the sales lessons. While watching this enjoyable TV series, I identified eleven solid analogies to sales and selling so we’ll get right to them because I’m sure you aren’t reading my sales articles for my opinions on faith or religion!

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  • Sales Process for the Anti-Sales Process Crowd

    • January 31, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    Road Signs

    You can look at sales process any way you want but if what you want are more consistent, predictable results, in a framework that supports sales coaching, then you want a customized, formal, milestone-centric, customer-focused sales process and scorecard!

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  • Wouldn’t Sales Call Play-by-Play Analyses be Fun?

    • January 27, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most sales managers protect their salespeople instead of pushing them to improve.  Most companies set budgets that formulaically increase year-over-year budgets by just 3.5%.  The sales recruiting process and selection criteria at most companies are horrible. Most sales training is product-focused instead of sales development.  Most salespeople are not consistently or effectively coached. Most senior sales leaders are indifferent about doing anything about those things. 

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  • Trump, The Iowa Caucus, and Sales Improvement

    • January 16, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    election results

    This course is the most fun you could ever have while going through sales training!  But it is so much more than fun and entertainment.  There are powerful selling lessons in each clip, and despite the fun, you will become more effective at all aspects of selling.  It doesn’t matter how long you have been in sales, what you sell, who you sell it to, the length of your sales cycle or the cost of your product or service.  Nor does it matter where your competency gaps are.

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  • Use Music to Understand the 12 Criteria Prospects Use to Buy from Salespeople

    • June 12, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    music

    Yesterday, while watching our son play in a summer collegiate baseball game, I missed a step and tumbled all the way down the bleachers.  Isn’t that a great analogy for what happens when you miss, or skip a crucial step in the sales process?  More than half of all salespeople are missing and skipping important milestones in the sales process each and every day and their egos get more bruised from failing to close those opportunities than my body got bruised from my not so thrilling adventure to the ground.

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  • The Problem with Self-Directed Sales Training and its Role in Developing Salespeople

    • June 8, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    sales training

    Yesterday, Andy Miller and I delivered onboarding training to a group of new partners at Objective Management Group (OMG).  Andy reached the slide that said “Lunch” at the end of the day, and I spent most of the morning displaying only slide #2 which could have been covered in 10 minutes.  The spontaneous, robust discussion that broke out was not planned, but most importantly, it was not discouraged.  To the contrary, it was strongly encouraged.  The group learned more from that spontaneous two-hour discussion than they ever would have learned from the sterile slides.  Are slides bad?

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  • Sometimes The Biggest Sales Problems Have the Simplest Solutions

    • May 30, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    sales problem

    There are simple, easy, fast and powerful solutions for sales problems too.  See my examples below.

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