Understanding the Sales Force

  • 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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  • Effect of Optimism and Commitment on the Sales Force

    • March 31, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’m reading Sarah Miller Caldicott‘s book, Innovate Like Edison.

    There are some noteworthy quotes which, although written in the context of innovation, apply equally, if not even more to selling and sales management.

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  • Baseball’s General Managers versus Business’ Sales Managers

    • March 30, 2010
    • Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The 2010 Major League Baseball season officially gets underway this Sunday evening with its greatest rivalry, the Boston Red Sox versus the New York Yankees, at Fenway Park. It gives me a great excuse to write a baseball themed article. But hey, what else would you expect from the author of Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball?

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