Understanding the Sales Force
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When it Comes to Compensation Sales is Not Like Baseball
- December 9, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The other day a client asked whether salespeople can make the jump from earning $85K to a position that could pay them $150K.
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How to Determine if Your Sales Process is Effective
- December 8, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Can you reverse engineer your sales calls?
OTHER THAN THE PART OF YOUR SALES CALL THAT INVOLVES PRESENTING, could you break down and explain, each step, strategy, tactic, question, response and milestone met, in the order they occurred, why they were chosen, and the resulting reaction of each occurrence, AFTER you’ve completed an entire sales cycle?
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Top 5 Success Factors for a Sales Training Initiative
- December 7, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If your company is about to begin a sales development initiative, do you know the factors that will determine its eventual success or failure? There are many and ultimately, like most systems and processes, they are only as good as the weakest link.
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Sales – It’s More Like Miss Universe Than the Olympics
- December 6, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sometimes I get the feeling that salespeople think that they are in the Olympics, where coming in second is OK. I hear things like, “At least we made the short list”, or “That will make them think about us next time”, or “If anything goes wrong they’ll call us first”, or, “Well now they know who we are”. But it’s not OK. Selling is more like Miss Universe. If you don’t win, you’ve lost!
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Another Behavioral Styles Assessment Pretends to Assess Salespeople
- December 3, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Their #4 is the Ability to Develop a Compelling Story – This IS a differentiator between good and bad salespeople – only they have it backwards! The bottom 74% have perfected the ability to present capabilities, value proposition, the brand promise and other pitches. The top 26% have perfected the ability to ask good, tough, timely questions. What good is the story unless you can tie it to the problems uncovered by effective questioning?
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Sales and Sales Management Simplified
- December 2, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In this article I make sales and sales management as simple as possible using some baseball analogies.
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The App Store Provides Insights into Your Company’s Sales Challenges
- November 30, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Is there any possibility that someone could go wrong buying from you? Is buying from your company the safest choice? Is it the easiest choice? Is it the traditional choice? Is it free or very low priced? Is it the tried and true choice?
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Winning in Sales Isn’t Everything – Yes it Is!
- November 29, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sales Manager: How did the call go?
Salesperson: Really good.
Sales Manager: Excellent.
Isn’t that a lame discussion? The sales manager can improve it by simply asking, “What made it such an excellent call?”
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The Science of Achievement Applied to Sales Success
- November 29, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Many salespeople have been in sales for ten plus years and aren’t the best of the best. They’re not even in the top 26%. I will use science to explain this. If we go back and look at Objective Management Group’s data on the salespeople that have been assessed so far, we find that 22% are not trainable (no incentive to change) and another 10% shouldn’t even be in sales. So that leaves 42% unaccounted for. What about them? I dug through the data and found that:
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Sales 2.0 Tools Have Their Place, But Where is It?
- November 23, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sales 2.0 – I love the tools, but they don’t replace the basics.