Understanding the Sales Force

  • Sales Managers Don’t Have to be Like Meteorologists!

    • January 27, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week I posted an article about the similarities between Meteorologists and Salespeople.  This morning, while watching the recap of our latest snowstorm this analogy became even more obvious to me.

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  • How Four Variations Influence Sales and the Way People Make Decisions

    • January 26, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    My regular readers know that I fall on the side of science, but the other three types of commenters feel so strongly about their positions that you would think they were talking science too.  It’s great when many people chime in with their comments.  That’s the beauty of a discussion forum or Blog – everyone gets to participate and weigh in.  But in the case of a question where its author expects an answer based on science, it becomes more difficult to separate opinions from experiences, gut instincts and facts.  Regardless of the type of comment offered, they all believe their comments to be factual.

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  • Top 10 Outcomes When Salespeople Screw Up Selling “Value Added”

    • January 25, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Value Added Selling is a wonderful thing – sometimes.

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  • Analogies for Boosting Sales

    • January 21, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’ve created a series of some of my better analogies in the hope that they provide some of those “ah-ha” moments which are so valuable to improving your sales force.

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  • What Meteorologists Have in Common with Salespeople

    • January 19, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Wow!  A plowable snow event.  No hype, no accumulation predictions, no mystery about the ever-moving rain/snow line, no warnings about treacherous travel, no details about the track of the storm and where it might go, just a “plowable snow event”.  The excitement and exhaustion from the previous 3 storms had surely numbed her senses.

    How does this apply to your sales force?

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  • The Sales Force and Beyond – Customer Impressions

    • January 18, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Lesson for National:  They may have the simplest VIP rental car pick up program on Planet Earth but if the people suck, so does the program! At least it sucks compared with Avis and Hertz (in my opinion).

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  • Death Defying Sales Calls – Don’t Get Run Off the Road

    • January 13, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Have a healthy degree of skepticism, push back and challenge everything you hear, especially when it’s what you wanted to hear, to avoid a case of happy ears.

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  • How Much Crap Do You Put Up With From Your Sales Force?

    • January 12, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    As much as this title resonates for most of you, your salespeople will probably ask, “Are you kidding me? It should say, ‘How much crap do we have to put up with from Management’?”

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  • The Will to Succeed, Sell Anything, Top Sales Books, and Coaching

    • January 10, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I was just wondering – do you or your salespeople play the lottery?  Do you or any of your salespeople have an inheritance coming?  These are two things that you might not think anything of but they can cause salespeople to lack the consistency and effort that are so important to sales success.  Salespeople maintain the mindset that financial success and independence, and the freedom to have what they want, when they want it, regardless of cost, must be earned and not handed to them.  Big base salaries and commissions from residual business can have an even greater negative effect except they are even more immediate threats to productivity than lotteries and inheritances!

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  • Did Your Salespeople Choose to Be in Sales?

    • January 5, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Even if you reviewed as many resumes as I do each week you might not notice this:  Most sales candidates did not have a sales position as their first job after college.  Most started as something else and then, out of the blue, they were in sales, sales management, marketing, or business development.  I always get suspicious when somewhere back in time a candidate went from Purchasing to Sales Management and never sold along the way…

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