Which Thoughts Affect How Successful You Will be in Sales?

June 27, 2016
Posted by: Dave Kurlan
Category: Understanding the Sales Force

I finished reading Game 7 – Ron Darling’s book on the final game of the 1986 World Series, and I’m half way through Shoe Dog – Nike creator Phil Knight’s memoir. They’re similar books because each devotes so much ink and analysis as to how their own thinking and beliefs – both positive and negative – shaped their actions and outcomes. Read them and imagine sales instead of baseball and entrepreneurship, and both books will help shape the ideal thought process to support selling! I highly recommend both books. I wrote a lot about beliefs in selling in both Mindless Selling and my best-seller, Baseline Selling. As a matter of fact, when Objective Management Group (OMG) measures this, only 45% of the sales population have 80% or more of the possible supportive sales beliefs and only 6% (elite territory) have better than 87% of the possible supportive sales beliefs!

We’re half way through 2016 and I’ve posted 60 more articles to my Blog. I used to measure the effectiveness of an article by the number of reads, but these days, that’s more a measure of whether the title or first sentence successfully got a reader to click through. Today, I think a better measure of an article’s overall impact is the number of LinkedIn shares it receives. As I usually do every six months, I listed the top ten articles from January through June ranked by LinkedIn shares. Chances are that you didn’t read them all so here goes:

#1 – Breaking News – More Salespeople Suck Than Ever Before

#2 – Must Read – This Email Proves How Poorly the Bottom 74% of Salespeople Perform

#3 – Learn How We Discovered They Had the Wrong Salespeople

#4 – The 5 Questions That Get Prospects to Buy so You Don’t Have to Sell

#5 – How Boomers and Millennials Differ in Sales

#6 – Sales Coaching and the Challenges of Different Types of Salespeople

#7 – What do you Blame When Salespeople Don’t Schedule Enough New Meetings?

#8 – What Percentage of Sales Managers Have the Necessary Coaching Skills?

#9 – How Wrong are Company Methods to Rank and Compensate Salespeople?

#10 – Why Uncovering Pain Doesn’t Close the Sale with a CEO and the 3 Conditions You Do Need

While those were the most shared, there are a couple that should have been shared more often but weren’t:

The 3 Most Important Questions about Sales Process