Understanding the Sales Force
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More Baseline Selling
- April 6, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’m watching the third baseball game of the young season. My team, the Red Sox, is trailing in the seventh inning. As Red Sox games go, this is boring, if not depressing. The most prolific offense of the last three years, the Sox hadn’t scored a single run. Similar to some sales calls, it began badly.
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5 Sales Management Best Practices
- April 5, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I found the article to be akin to naming passing, receiving, blocking, tackling and kicking as the five baseball best practices.
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Spamelot and Selling
- April 1, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’m not a proponent of canned presentations – they’re boring. I hate it when prospects ask salespeople to make a capabilities presentation. Your salespeople are expected to do this and as a result of agreeing to do this, they bore their prospects to death.
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Entrepreneurship
- March 29, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Did you experience any similar conditioning averse behavior when you were younger? In hindsight, can you recognize that you behaved in ways that would lead you to the business you’re currently in?
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When Salespeople are Struggling
- March 21, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There are dozens of reasons why performance among salespeople falls short of requirements or expectations. Your salespeople should over achieve, not under achieve.
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Great New Book on Selling – The Inside Story
- March 15, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My research and statistics from evaluating 250,000 salespeople revealed that 74% of all salespeople are ineffective.
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What Salespeople Can Learn From Dogs
- March 12, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Many salespeople could learn the art of timing from Bloomie. Back in the days when I was the primary producer for my company, Bloomie would join me in the conference room for every sales call. At the point in time where I had my prospects feeling most uncomfortable with their situations, Bloomie would awaken from her slumber, wiggle her butt in the air, make some hilarious sounds, wait for the prospect to laugh, and then lay down and go back to sleep.
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Sales Candidate Doesn’t Qualify
- March 10, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Don’t allow yourself to be influenced by your feelings when the evidence suggests otherwise.
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The Sales Call Gone Bad
- March 9, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When most salespeople talk about calls gone bad they’re often talking about sales horror stories, a trend developed by Dan Seidman at Monster Sales News. I believe that any sales call that fails to move forward (next step, base or stage) is a bad call. When a prospect ‘didn’t hear anything that interested him’, one of two things happened:
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Losing Customers – Who is to Blame?
- March 8, 2006
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most companies experience losing important customers or clients at some point in time and statistics can certainly support a claim that you can’t keep every customer happy. But it’s that justification that usually hides the real problem, a problem that can duplicate itself again and again.