Understanding the Sales Force
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What Can a Trip to Cancun Teach You About Managing Salespeople?
- February 25, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One of my most popular posts, from September 2006, What Can a Trip to Italy Teach You about Managing New Salespeople. Well we just returned from a trip to Cancun and I have some new lessons to write about today.
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Sales Candidates – Their Assessments Come to Life
- February 16, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In most interviews, you can watch a sales candidate’s assessment come to life. The more weaknesses they have, the more you’ll see them behave in a way that demonstrates those weaknesses. You’ll never see those weaknesses in more detail, than when the candidate objects to some part of the recruiting process. I posted an article last May 13 that a candidate took issue with. If you read the thread of comments below the article, you can see how the candidate’s weaknesses were extremely evident in his writing.
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How Salespeople Contribute to Losing Accounts – Post Mortem
- February 13, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Last week I posted an article about horrific customer service and non-existent follow-up by salespeople. Today, I offer you the post-mortem, the “I can’t believe this is still not completely resolved after everything that happened in the last two weeks” post.
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Successful Salespeople & Will Smith
- February 13, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Reader’s Digest ran a feature story on Will Smith, star of the hit movie, The Persuit of Happiness. Will’s character is not the only one in this story obsessed with winning. It turns out that Will is also obsessed with winning, being the best and being the most successful. He believes that he can be the best at anything he chooses to undertake. He not only shares this trait with the likes of Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump and other well known celebrities, but with some of the most successful salespeople as well. I posted an article on this subject in October.
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How Salespeople Contribute to Losing Accounts
- February 8, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I received some really lousy customer service this week and it perfectly demonstrates exactly what salespeople can do and not do to lose their good accounts.
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Top 10 Factors for Getting Salespeople to Overachieve
- February 4, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There isn’t a single key to overachieving, so I’ll list my top 10 factors for helping salespeople overachieve. I’m sure I’ve written about each of these topics at some point in the past, but I’ll put them all together here.
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Managing Salespeople That Work in a Remote Location
- February 1, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One of the newer findings in our assessment is whether a sales candidate can succeed in a remote location. Two of the many items that make up this finding are (1) whether a candidate can work independently and (2) whether a candidate can work without supervision. For some reason, these two findings have confused people – a lot – so I’ll explain the difference here.
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CEO Alert – What’s Wrong with Your Sales Management Team
- January 25, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, I was the keynote speaker at an Executive Luncheon, addressing around 175 CEO’s. It was a typical audience that responded in a typical way – except for a couple of them. One attendee (not a CEO) wanted to know how his large company could be more effective getting people who appeared to be a good fit to actually succeed. He also said that while they wanted to improve in that area, he wasn’t willing to change their processes, tools, sequence, management involvement, etc. Consider this analogy: You’re sick, taking medicine and the drugs aren’t working. The Doctor suggests changing meds to help you him get better and he prefers to continue using the drugs that aren’t helping. Stupid? Only if we grade him.
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Top 5 Reasons Why Sales Managers Don’t See Their Salespeople Objectively?
- January 10, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A question was posed as to why sales managers don’t view their salespeople the same as we view their salespeople when we evaluate them. It’s a great question too. And I wish I had the answer. I have some theories…
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Salespeople – Vacations and the Lack of Urgency
- January 4, 2007
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Take the recent holiday for example. The successful salespeople closed a ton of business right before Christmas. The unsuccessful salespeople left a lot of business on the table in December, expecting to have giant Januaries, and today may be thinking February will be the month.