sales process
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Must Read – This Email Proves How Poorly the Bottom 74% of Salespeople Perform
- February 17, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Ken is one of my longtime readers, a former client, and last week he sent this note expressing his frustrations as a buyer of services. I’ll add my comments and conclusions at the end of his note.
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Sales Performance – Stop Worrying About the Words You Say
- January 25, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When coaching, most sales managers change the words their salespeople use. “That’s not how I would say it – try this instead!” While there are a couple of key moments in the sales process where the words do actually matter, for 98% of the sales process, it’s about listening and asking appropriate questions, following the process, achieving key milestones, following the company’s general strategy and using appropriate sales tactics. It’s almost never about the actual words. For example, last week I coached a salesperson who was using all of the words the other salespeople on the team were instructed to use – but with vastly different results. I think you’ll find the coaching interesting.
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What True Story Does Your Sales Pipeline Tell You about Your Business?
- November 5, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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Sales Slumps – What Causes Them and How to Fix Them
- September 28, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
During the course of a baseball season, both hitters and pitchers fall into slumps. In basketball, players slump with their outside shots and from the foul line. Football Quarterbacks go into passing slumps. Golf and Tennis pros have swing slumps. Tiger has been in a slump since Thanksgiving of 2009! (I’m sure there must be some kind of a slump that Soccer players can fall victim to, but I don’t know enough about soccer to weigh in.) With slumps being so common, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that salespeople get into slumps too. In this article, we’ll explore what causes salespeople to get into slumps, what their slumps look like, and how can they be fixed.
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Driving, Asking Questions, Inside Sales, and Sales Process with a Twist
- September 8, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
“You’ve been driving a car since you were a teenager, but your cars have always had an automatic transmission and you’ve always driven on standard roads. Now we will ask you to drive a much larger car, drive it at faster speeds, on an obstacle course, with people in your way. Oh, and one more thing – for the first time, you’ll be driving a six-speed manual transmission. You might be afraid to take your foot off the clutch and put the car into first gear because, if you’re not careful, you might kill those people standing in front of your car!
“That’s how salespeople sometimes feel when they need to be liked and are expected to ask their prospects some really difficult questions. Salespeople think someone will be killed – and they worry that it might be them!”
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Increase Sales by 20% – Guide to Creating an Effective Sales Process
- September 3, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Earlier this week I received this inquiry form from our “Ask a Sales Expert” page:
Someone from my team always responds to these inquiries and it was my turn. I want to share the correspondence, but it’s even more important to read the accompanying explanation, interpretation, warning and lesson. If I can help you to understand this and get your sales process correct, the data suggests that there is a corresponding 20% increase to sales!
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Why Inbound and Inside Sales Experts Think Sales Process is Dead Too
- August 18, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I love and use some of their tools and services and recommend them to clients too. But the key word here is tools. They support and enhance selling. Tools don’t replace selling.
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The Science of Sales Selection vs. the Marketing of Modern Selling
- August 14, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I started with more than 100 sales-specific findings and narrowed them down to the 18 findings and scores that clearly differentiated their tops from their bottoms. A mistake made by behavioral scientists and sellers of personality and behavioral styles assessments is that they only look at top performers and identify common traits. They fail to realize that the bottom performers have the same personality traits and behavioral styles as the top performers and none of those traits or styles are predictive of sales performance.
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Closing Sales, Process, Hauntings, Training & More
- March 23, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today I will explore the least-read articles I have ever written. That’s right. The least read. It’s very fashionable – and a best practice – to continue promoting the most-read, most-liked, most-favorited, most-shared, most-tweeted and most-commented articles; but I don’t think anyone has gathered up their worst work and said, “Look at this!” It’s actually not my worst writing.
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Top 5 Sales Issues Leaders Should Not Focus On
- November 19, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Did you ever watch Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or Aaron Rogers have a bad day at Quarterback? Did you notice that the following day, everyone was saying that he sucked? While it’s possible that these three Quarterbacks could have a bad day, most of their bad days are less about them and more about whether or not their offensive lines gave them the time and protection they needed to find an open man and make a good pass. It could also have something to do with whether or not their receivers were able to quickly get open.