Understanding the Sales Force

  • “Spirited” Has So Much in Common with Most Salespeople

    • November 29, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Only 13% of all salespeople take a consultative approach to selling and almost none of them can be found in the bottom 50% – the group that fails to meet quota each year.  A coincidence? On the other end of the spectrum, the top 10% of all salespeople are 4300% more likely to have the Consultative Seller competency as a strength!

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  • 5 Reasons Sales Teams Underperform Like My Old Wiper Blades

    • November 17, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I speak with a lot of CEOs and Sales Leaders from companies whose sales teams are underperforming.  One thing they seem to have in common is the mileage problem.  When I ask how long the sales team has been underperforming, it is usually the equivalent of 60,000 miles.  It’s not a new problem, the signs have been there for YEARS but something recently changed to the extent that they couldn’t tolerate it any longer.  The sales team’s performance was finally presenting a threat (safety) whereby one or more of revenue, earnings, sustainability, personal income, stock prices, turnover, market share, morale and more were at risk.

    What causes executives to wait so long?  Here are five potential reasons:

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  • The Wall Street Journal Shares News About What it Takes to Succeed in Sales

    • November 14, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’m not anti-Wall Street Journal – at least I wasn’t.  I haven’t written about their articles before. After all, they aren’t known for writing the kind of crap that the Harvard Business Review  writes with regard to sales and selling.   

    While reviewing the article, I identified two themes – how much harder it is to sell today versus years ago and how millennials have adapted to changing times.

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  • Can a New Sales Manager Be a Difference Maker?

    • November 9, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I speak with so many sales leaders who tell me about the four sales managers they went through in the last two years.  I speak with CEOs who tell me about the three sales VPs they went through in the last eighteen months.

    There is tremendous pressure to fill these roles because your team’s performance will suffer without someone at the helm.  Or is that misinformation?  How much worse could a team perform than how they perform under a sucky sales manager?

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  • New Data: Will Salespeople Hit Quota When Sales Managers Coach and Sell?

    • November 7, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Instead of spending their time on coaching, sales managers are spending too much of their time on personal sales.  Sales managers with fewer than 5 salespeople may be required to carry a quota but generally speaking, sales managers are expected to spend no more than 5% of their time selling. OMG’s data shows that the percentage of time that sales managers sell is closer to 13%.

    Why do they sell instead of having more coaching conversations?  There are several reasons:

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  • New Data: Is Sales Compensation Aligned With Changing Motivational Needs?

    • October 31, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When interviewing sales and sales leadership candidates, similar counter-intuitive discussions occur. Many candidates claim that money isn’t that important because they love sales – until they claim that the base salary isn’t high enough.  For others, even though they may not disclose it, the base salary is completely irrelevant as long as the company won’t cap the salesperson’s total earnings. We need to decode the topic of compensation so that we can be sure that both the base salary and the total on-plan earnings are acceptable to candidates.

    It is very important to make sense of the hidden and unpredictable compensation responses because many salespeople leave the company after a short time because they don’t believe earnings are equivalent to the compensation that was promised.

    It is crucial to understand that salespeople are motivated primarily by one of two motivational styles and unless you wish to hire only one type of salesperson, there must be two compensation plans that should be tailored accordingly.  Let’s discuss this.

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  • The Irony of Free Passes for Under Performing Salespeople

    • October 21, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A typical US sales team consists of 15 people, including a Sales VP, 2 Regional Sales Managers, and 12 salespeople.  Of course, there are exponentially larger and smaller sales teams, but this is the version that we most frequently encounter.  This team will have no more than 3 performing salespeople, another 3 who sometimes hit their numbers, and 6 who chronically under-perform.

    Let’s assume that the salespeople who are ranked 10-12 are not just under-performers, but pathetically ineffective salespeople.  At the end of the year, they receive their annual review – the equivalent of an arrest and release – and are back on the street to underperform for another year, making the company both both the victim and the enabler.  This is insanity!

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  • The Bob Chronicles – The Difference Between Selling Skills and Effectiveness

    • October 12, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today a client asked me to explain the difference between skills and effectiveness. You won’t find the answer by doing a Google search as that search turns up exactly nothing on the subject.  This article will discuss the similarity between symptoms/causes and skills/effectiveness. Do you remember Bob, the subject of many articles and my favorite weak salesperson to write about?

    Bob strikes again!

    I’ve written 10 articles about Bob and everyone says that the Bob series is their favorite.

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  • How to Hire the Right Salespeople Using This Jeep vs. Infiniti Analogy

    • October 7, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Usually, the overall score, relative strength of a candidate’s capabilities, and recommendation are more important than any specific scores.  Usually.  But with the assessment of Mary, it was an entirely different story.  

    Let’s review the scores and findings from Mary’s OMG Sales Candidate Assessment. She had really good scores.  Really good. Her Sales Percentile was 82 so she was stronger than 82% of the salespeople in the world. So was OMG wrong?  Why did the company hire her?  Why did she fail?

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  • How Your Sales Team Can Double its Win Rate in a Recession

    • September 26, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A client was having great success using OMG (Objective Management Group) to assess their sales candidates and they assumed the sales candidate assessment was the only thing OMG offered.  When they learned that our core offering is evaluating their existing sales team they became excited about what that would mean for addressing their two biggest selling challenges.  

    One of their issues was their 20% win rate was much lower than they thought it should be and they believed their salespeople needed some refresher training on closing.  They also had a large number of opportunities stalled in the pipeline and they believed that training on more effective techniques to conduct follow up calls would help.

    In this article, I thought it might help if I share a bit of what they learned about their sales team.

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