sales process
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Steam Vent Hack That Salespeople Can Use on Stalled Opportunities
- August 23, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The guide simply lit a cigarette, lowered it slightly into the vent, it reacted with the air and the steam, and significantly increased the output of steam. A super simple hack that instantly causes a performance improvement gets your attention!
Of course, that got me thinking about a simple hack that will significantly improve sales performance and I present one to you in this article.
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Is Sales Today Nothing More than its Tech Stack?
- August 9, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you are on the sales team in any function, focus on selling and ignore the noise and distractions of anything that isn’t directly helping you develop your skills to book more meetings, improve your ability to reach decision makers, build relationships and trust, take a consultative approach, sell value, qualify and close business.
To everything else simply say “fuck off.”
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How to Prepare for the Big Sales Presentation
- June 24, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The goal of the big presentation, as with the debate, is to differentiate, but that requires knowing your competition’s strengths and weaknesses and being able to point out those where you are superior. Assuming that your price will be higher, you must represent its value and it must be that value that stands out above and beyond everything else. How can you be the value?
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Stop the Dysfunction in the Sales Function
- June 17, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For some reason, a plurality of executives think way too highly of their company’s sales capabilities and believe they will figure it out themselves. Egos and hurt feelings take priority over best practices, right people in the right seats, sales competencies and sales processes.
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10 Reasons Why You Can’t Outsell an Incumbent
- June 7, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When the strategy is correct, the messaging can be perfected.
When the strategy and messaging are correct, the sales process can be optimized.
When the sales process is optimized, the sales tactics will work.
Stop winging it. Stop struggling. Stop losing.
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Onboarding and 11 Reasons Why Salespeople are Failing
- May 8, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When it comes to sales onboarding, nearly half were not onboarded in their first sales job and 23% more received no sales training relative to how the company’s products/services should be sold. If you were one of those new salespeople, it will come as no surprise but for the rest, and especially those of us who invested in our careers, became students of selling or like me, entered the field of sales development, it’s malpractice practiced at scale by millions of companies. They believe that salespeople should just know what they’re supposed to do and figure it out. How hard can it be? Ha!
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Winning and Retaining Business When There is Competition
- April 30, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We were away for most of April, watching our son play his senior year of college baseball. When we left Massachusetts, the calendar said early April, the grass and gardens were still dormant and the weather felt like mid-January with some games played in 25-degree wind chills!
When we returned home three weeks later, we looked outside and saw life! Flowers were in bloom, the Bradford Pears and Crab Apple trees had blossoms, and the green grass had already been mowed a couple of times. Although we weren’t there, nature did its thing without us.
Pivot to sales.
It doesn’t matter whether salespeople are in account management or account executive roles. The sales equivalent of nature at work occurs at both target accounts and existing accounts. When salespeople aren’t physically present or on the phone with decision makers at the account, it is likely that one of their competitors is physically present or on the phone competing for the business or trying to take their business away. Just because a salesperson doesn’t see or hear about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
What can you do?
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Baseball, The Toad and Coaching Unresponsive Salespeople
- April 11, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Coaching salespeople is challenging. When they aren’t responsive to coaching it’s not only more difficult, it is downright frustrating. When you’re attempting to coach unresponsive salespeople to use the phone to directly talk with a decision maker, there isn’t much upside. Whether you’ve made this coaching attempt one time or one hundred times, the outcome will be the same, so the question we should be asking is, should this salesperson still be working for you?
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250 Best Articles on Sales and Sales Leadership by Category
- April 4, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
These are the top 10 articles in 25 categories on sales, sales leadership, sales assessments, sales performance, sales excellence, sales process and more.
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Homicide Detective Makes Best Case for Sales Process
- March 21, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The author admits that until he conducted his “cold-case investigation” of the New Testament, he was an atheist who always followed the evidence to find the truth. Similarly, a lot of prospects are also non-believers – not necessarily in Jesus – in your product or service. As I read and learned about the author’s methods for uncovering truth, or proof, I felt that salespeople could learn a lot about proof of concept, presenting facts, backing up claims, return on investment, and offering credible testimonials. That’s not nearly the analogy I’m going to make.
Wallace shared a story in the Forward about the time he was shot by a criminal who was on parole, and was not allowed to have a firearm. Up until the moment of the shooting, Wallace believed that a bullet-proof vest would stop a bullet. In the moment of the shooting, he believed in the bullet proof vest. At that moment his belief changed from “belief that” to “belief in.” That was the analogy he wished to apply to the gospels. He wondered if he could find the evidence to replace faith (belief that the miracles occurred) with proof (belief in both Jesus and the miracles).
That also happens to be my analogy from the book. Most salespeople believe that a sales process can help them succeed while the very best salespeople believe in their sales process.