- March 9, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sometimes things happen in ways that you never plan for. Last week, a blog post appeared on another site that listed, 8 Things that the Top 1% of Salespeople Do Differently. In response, I posted a simple counter argument on my blog. The extremely popular article was syndicated by CustomerThink.com, where the conversation picked up comments from both doubters and supporters alike. It was a perfect storm except in this case, it was more like Objective Management Group‘s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessments on trial. You won’t believe some of the things that were said! In my opinion, that very conversation is now the ultimate, defining conversation comparing the science behind OMG’s award-winning sales assessments, to gut instinct, faith, intuition and experience. The conversation explored whether or not the science was accurate, valid, predictive, consistent, and reliable. The contrarions weighed in, the know-it-alls spoke up, and eventually, the supporters arrived in droves. If you read only one article/discussion on sales selection tools in your lifetime, this must be the one. Read and Join the discussion here, but I warn you, it contains a LOT of very compelling and highly-charged reading.
In February, I wrote another extremely popular article which won awards for best article of the day, week and month. Depending on where it appeared, it had a title of either The 25 Ways That Selling Has Changed or How Dramatically Has Selling Changed? One of the comments, by Chris Bealle, CEO of ConnectAndSell, asked a similar question about sales management, so last week I wrote How Dramatically Has Sales Leadership Changed for EcSell Institute’s in advance of their Spring Coaching Summit (I’ll be there speaking about The Four Keys to Selling Value).
As OMG celebrates its 25th year of pioneering, growing and perfecting the science of sales evaluation and sales assessments, I will have a lot more to say on this subject…starting right now. For many years, Neil Rackham has long been considered the father of sales research. After all, his body of work includes research on more than 10,000 salespeople, he wrote SPIN Selling, and he has had an impressive career on this side of sales. As someone who loves comparison data, I would like to remind people that my data and research at OMG is nearing 1 million salespeople evaluated and assessed. That’s almost 100 times more data than Neil Rackham has and I have used it to write several award-winning White Papers. He has sold more copies of SPIN Selling than I have of my book, Baseline Selling, but he had a 20-year headstart on me… By the way, if you haven’t read Baseline Selling, it continues to be a very popular 5-star read and I receive notes from people every single day telling me how much they love it and the impact it has had on growing their revenue. Have you read Baseline Selling?