sales excellence
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The Crucial Selling Skill That Nobody Talks About
- October 14, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I couldn’t care less because the tool looked lame and if he thought that he was going to hurt my feelings with his threat to remove my name he is as stupid as he is impatient. And patience is what I want to talk about today.
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What it Takes to be an Elite (Top 7%) Salesperson
- October 11, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week I received a call from a young, motivated salesperson – we’ll call him Jim – who desperately wanted to be one of the elite 7% of all salespeople. Despite being just 26 years old, he believed that he was already in the top 7%. During our call, he asked me a great question. He asked, “How many of the top 7% have you actually met and where are they today?” I didn’t have to think very long or hard to answer that question because it was one of the easiest questions I have ever been asked.
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What is the Single Biggest Differentiator Between Top and Bottom Salespeople?
- October 3, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There is one Blog that I never fail to read, and that’s Seth Godin’s Blog. Seth doesn’t write about sales – he pens a thought leadership Blog – but sometimes his articles are very applicable to sales and selling. Recently, he posted two very short articles – each is less than 30 seconds to read and I believe they are both well worth your time.
The first is Fully Baked. The second, on a related topic, is Skills vs. Talents.
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Top 10 Reasons Why Sales Don’t Grow
- August 24, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Despite knowing that things don’t fix themselves, thousands of executives believe that sales problems will resolve themselves, change, and improve. Why?
That’s the key question. Because when you don’t know exactly what’s wrong, it’s much easier to remain in denial.
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What the Sales World Can Learn from Marathon Participants
- April 23, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While some professional runners enter a marathon, more than 30,000 people were simply participating because they could. These participants have full-time jobs, careers and businesses. This is a hobby. Yet their commitment to this hobby should be embarrassing to most salespeople, who don’t put forth anywhere near this level of commitment, effort, time or practice into their own career!
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Great Salespeople Can See the Pixels – The Rest Watch the Movie
- March 6, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We have been describing the Consultative Sales approach. How do your salespeople fare in their ability to sell consultatively and, more importantly, which of them can be trained and coached to effectively execute this with consistency and results?
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How the Landscape Quickly Changes on Your Salespeople
- February 27, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Give your salespeople these two pictures and the next time they begin to think that everything seems wonderful, make sure they remember to brush the snow away, take off their rose colored glasses, and learn what the landscape truly looks like underneath the false interest.
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Sales Excellence Studies Propagate Mediocrity
- February 26, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you conduct a Google search for “sales excellence studies”, you’ll find more than 20,000 results. I’m sure that some results point to surveys which were conducted by others, but either way, that’s a lot of studies on sales excellence. If any of those studies were actually ground-breaking, insightful or truly representative of sales excellence, there would probably be fewer than a dozen. But there are not. There are many reasons why these studies are so lame, but let’s name just a few:
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What Happens When You Develop Sales Competencies?
- April 10, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Earlier this week I wrote an article for my Baseline Selling Tips Newsletter. It was about What Sleep Apnea and Sales Improvement Have in Common. If you don’t get my Newsletter, you’ll need to read that article in order for the rest of this post to make sense.
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Surprising Statistics from the Sales Force Grader
- December 22, 2008
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The actual results are even more surprising than the number of people (several hundred) that have already visited the FREE Sales Force Grader.