sales training
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Why Do Salespeople Forget What They Learn?
- August 21, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Some salespeople are fortunate enough to get trained and/or coached. Maybe it’s an all-day seminar, not really training as much as exposure to some different thinking or approach. We don’t expect anything to change from a single day, so why should you? I went to a short game golf school for a day. It was awesome while I was there, but 4 years later, I can’t do any of the things I learned there. Comprehensive sales training (8-16 months) leads us to expect dramatic change and a significant increase in sales.
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Top 6 Reasons Decision Makers Fail to Attend Your Meetings
- July 30, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My mind doesn’t work the same as most people. I always seem to find a sales analogy buried somewhere. Frank, who writes the Sales Archaeologist Blog, has that ability too.
Recently, at a picnic with my family, I took note of all the guests and couldn’t help but see the similarities between the picnic and selling to a group.
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How Much Sales Development Can Leadership Do In-House?
- July 17, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
From time to time, clients want to handle some of the services we provide in-house. “Why can’t we do the sales process ourselves?” They can, but a few questions come to mind. If they didn’t have an effective, efficient, optimized, formal, structured sales process for the last 20 years, where would this expertise suddenly come from to create this process tomorrow? What if they get it wrong?
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Top 3 Reasons Why Salespeople Fail at Consultative Selling?
- July 8, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One of the challenges with a consultative approach is that while it is easier to close the sale, it is far more difficult to implement than the traditional, transactional approach that today makes it so much harder to get the sale closed. The question is why?
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The Waffle Cone and the Mass Production of Salespeople
- July 2, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For me, today’s waffle cones are a constant disappointment because they always fail to meet my expectations.
What does this have to do with selling?
Think about salespeople as a version of the waffle cone. In some companies, they are made fresh, and in other companies, especially bigger companies, they are mass-produced.
There are many ways of looking at th
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Top 10 Reasons Why Salespeople Let Price Drive the Sale
- May 10, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Selling value.
What comes so easily to the top 6% and some of the top 26% is so very difficult for others.
Most salespeople have little capability to effectively build value. Talking about what your company does better or differently or telling a prospect what your value proposition is does not build value. Instead, value comes from 3 things:
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Sales Management Best Practices – Are Top Salespeople Challengers?
- April 29, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I don’t promote an approach based on either Relationships or Solution Selling, but both must be incorporated into an appropriate sales approach. Also worth noting, the approach or methodology is only one part of selling. Without a sales process and a sales model, no methodology will work very well on its own.
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Why Salespeople Won’t Abandon the Early Demo and Presentation
- March 4, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you want your sales force to strive for sales excellence, the bottom line is that your salespeople won’t drive this transition and neither will a sales manager. You have to drive it. You must commit to it and it must be a sustained commitment. It’s not a do-it-yourself project, so you must also be prepared to do it correctly, get help from a results-oriented firm, and lead by example.
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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: