sales training
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Price Quotes and the Inability of Salespeople to Sell Value
- October 19, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week, I was training a sales force to sell value – an absolutely revolutionary concept – when the unthinkable happened, not once, but twice in the same training. As incredible as it was to me, it clearly illustrates why it is so darn hard for companies to get their salespeople to sell value.
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Keys to Selecting a Sales Training Company
- July 2, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I can always tell when a Sales VP is worried about these things because they’ll start asking all of the wrong questions. They’ll want to know about agendas, content, slides, handouts, style, approach and timing. Instead they should be asking about results, solutions, and what they need to do to make it work!
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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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How Can a Simple Zero Derail a Sale or Deal?
- January 7, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today, I was coaching a very talented salesperson, one who is even better at getting deals closed. Yesterday, he closed a large deal when late in the day, and completely out of nowhere, he got the dreaded “we changed our mind” email. This is his story.
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Solitaire and Modern Sales Training – What Should it Cover and Include?
- October 6, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve been playing one of those Solitaire games on my iPad and I can routinely score in the neighborhood of 2 minutes and 30 seconds, with my best time being just under 2 minutes. I thought I was doing pretty well until I realized that my wife routinely scores between 1 minute and 1:20 seconds with her best scores (not score) being under 1 minute. She has scored as low as 48 seconds.
If not for my wife, I would have thought I was a real pro at Solitaire!
This is exactly how many CEO’s, Presidents and Sales VP’s view their sales forces. Without anything or anyone with whom to compare, they form their judgements on sales effectiveness in a vacuum. I routinely hear things like, “We have a custom sales process.”, and “We’ve been working on consultative selling.” Yet, after a sales force evaluation has been completed, those same companies are routinely found to have been lagging, not leading, in those areas.
When it comes to providing sales training for your sales force, what exactly, should modern training include?
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Why There is No Value When You Provide Value Via Special Pricing
- September 29, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I was discussing the OMG Partnership opportunity with a gentlemen from Hong Kong, who objected to our reasonable licensing fees, refusing to pay any fees to a US company. This is when the conversation began to resemble a sales call. He did what a lot of buyers do to salespeople and began to boast about how well-positioned his company is to market OMG in Hong Kong and what a huge opportunity this would be for OMG. He expected me to waive the fees in exchange for the great opportunity he described.
Most salespeople – 74% to be exact – not wishing to jeopardize a great opportunity, start negotiating or worse, agreeing, to the unrealistic requests. There are ripple effects to this, for example:
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Why You Must Understand This about Desire for Sales Success
- August 20, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One of the most frequent questions we get from clients has to do with the second most important finding on Objective Management Group’s (OMG) sales and sales management evaluations. “This is one of my top salespeople – how can she possibly lack Desire for sales success?”
It’s a great question and I hope to explain it fully here.
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Fine Tune Your Sales Force as You Optimize Your Computer
- June 18, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I deleted about 10,000 sent items from Outlook, repaired the machine’s permissions, restarted the laptop, and it was performing to expectations again. I was excited about what I had accomplished in such a short time!
That process isn’t very different from what executives must do with an underperforming sales force.
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Key to Significantly Improve Sales Training Results
- May 28, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The best players, getting the advanced instruction on the travel teams, improve the most. Those same kids, on their regular season team, learn almost nothing new and aren’t challenged or pushed. Practice, and sometimes even the games, can be so boring for them that they don’t play their very best.
Translation from Baseball to Selling
If we translate all of that baseball to selling, the only two things that change are the activity and the age of the people being coached and trained.
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Top 5 Reasons Sales Prospects Ask for References
- May 19, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Everything is going along great, your prospect seems quite interested, they’ve agreed with your points, accepted your pushback, you got them qualified and you’re heading for the home stretch.
It doesn’t matter if this has all occurred in the last 45 minutes, or if this took place over a series of meetings, calls and months.
They ask for references.
The best example of doing a lousy job in this area is the salesperson who was referred in, yet still gets asked for references!
How a salesperson handles the request for references is crucial and most salespeople screw it up royally.