Understanding the Sales Force

  • Football’s Pitch Count and its Connection to Sales Management

    • April 22, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Herm Edwards, currently of ESPN and formerly the Head Coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, was interviewed on WEEI, Boston’s Sports Talk Radio station today. He said a couple of things that were quite compelling:

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  • Who Do You Call When Your Sales Forecast is Busted?

    • April 20, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When your short-term sales forecast indicates that you’ll come up short this period (month), what do you direct your salespeople to do in order to fill the gap?

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  • When the Sales Goals Change but the Behavior and Results Don’t

    • April 19, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Suppose that you need your salespeople to find significantly more new business.  Perhaps you’ve wanted this for a while but it’s only recently that you communicated this to your salespeople.  You’ve changed the goal but after a month your salespeople’s behavior and results haven’t changed at all. 

    Let’s compare this to weight loss. 

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  • Call Reluctance in Salespeople – Causes, Factors, and Predictors

    • April 15, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Objective Management Group (OMG) has always been able to accurately (to 95%) predict whether a salesperson would succeed and provide conditions for employment. Over the years, we’ve been able to fine tune our accuracy even more as we incorporated some additional non-sales factors that made strong salespeople poor candidates for a particular role or company.  Three of the most important, recent factors were:

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  • Customer Service Neutralizes Efforts of Your Sales Force

    • April 14, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I am more convinced every day that the most overlooked and under-rated sales function in most companies is their customer service department.

    This extends beyond toll-free phone numbers and includes the people you meet when you walk into a company’s retail locations too.

    When was the last time you ended a conversation with customer service feeling thrilled that you were a customer of companies like Dell, Verizon, USAirways, Charter or Microsoft?  Would that change if I typed Apple instead of Dell?

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  • Sales Advice Hits the Spot in April Inc. Magazine

    • April 13, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Here’s one quote I liked from the director of supplier diversity from UPS:

    “People will say, ‘I’ve got this really exciting proposal I want you to look at.’  I’ll say, ‘send it to me.’ Then they send it to me by FedEx. It happens every day. Just be smart. Know the company you are pitching to and know their likes and dislikes.  You get such brownie points with me when you come in with a UPS envelope and have an account all set up.  It’s just the little things like that, the icing on the cake.”

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  • Latest Sales Recruiting Breakthrough – Download the New White Paper

    • April 12, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    About six weeks ago, I started a discussion and asked, How Long Should a Salesperson Stick?  I followed that up with a more researched discussion and provided The Top 5 Factors to Predict Sales Turnover.  Over the past six weeks I have continued to research the two subjects and the results of my work are now available in my brand new White Paper, “Sales Longevity – The Science of Predicting Sales Turnover”. 

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  • 3 Sales Approaches of Elite Salespeople

    • April 8, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Great salespeople must be able to easily use all three approaches on their sales calls.  Salespeople that struggle tend to have just one approach and it won’t work all the time. 

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  • What Happens When Sales Expectations Aren’t Met?

    • April 6, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When your salespeople focus too much of their time and resources on a large opportunity and it doesn’t materialize, you can lose 6-12 months of productivity from them. 

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  • Case History – How Not to Hire Salespeople

    • April 2, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A company wants to hire 5000 salespeople – but why?

    2000 drop out before completing training, and another 2000 drop out during the first 90 days in the field. Another 500 drop out during the first 6 months, and at the end of the year they only have 500 of the original 5000 standing.  What would it be worth to them from a cost, time, resources and practicality standpoint for us to simply identify, in advance, the final 500, before anyone is hired?

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