Understanding the Sales Force
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Compensation – the Unchanging Role
- May 23, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s quite interesting to learn that a company is considering a change to the manner in which they compensate their salespeople. This typically occurs when a company has already discovered a flaw and management is hoping that a modification, usually in the form of more commissions and less salary, will motivate their sales force to find some new business.
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Sinking in the Pool
- May 18, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A sales manager from the company we discussed in ‘Retooling the Sales Force’ asked me about a candidate they were considering. He had mixed emotions: on the one hand, this candidate was actually borderline hirable, a rarity for them. On the other hand, the sales manager was frustrated over the lack of recommended candidates. Now that they were assessing candidates prior to interviewing them, he didn’t understand why so many of the candidates were not recommended.
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Cherry Picking
- May 16, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
“I know my body. I know what’s right and what’s not. I don’t need blood work or X-Rays. I just need to know why I’m always lethargic and have constant headaches. Can’t you just see me and check out my head?”
Evaluating part of a sales organization may in fact reveal something about the specific people we look at but it is never representative of the sales force as an entity.
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When Big is Bad
- May 12, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A recent discussion with a top executive from a Fortune 1000 company provided some great insight – for him – as to the difficulties that large companies face when attempting to optimize their sales organizations.
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Something’s Gotta Give
- May 10, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today we learned about a company that has 100% turnover – and they aren’t in the insurance business! This company burns out its 6-figure performers as well as the other 85% of the sales force, those who fail inside of 60 days.
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Gut or Guts
- May 5, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While history proves that the gut is unreliable for predicting sales success and science provides accurate information to predict sales success, the smart, modern sales manager must take advantage of that information until he can prove that his gut is more reliable than science. Are you a smart, modern manager or a gutsy manager who relies on gut?
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Retooling the Sales Force
- May 4, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The executive team of a company whose sales force we recently evaluated wanted to ‘retool’ the sales force. Their salespeople were comfortable selling into one of the three markets on which they needed a presence, but not the other two markets. The executive team wanted to know whether it was easier to hire new salespeople or to develop the existing salespeople.
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Be Still My Pipeline
- May 1, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We evaluated a sales force this week that had pipeline problems. Most companies have pipeline problems; they simply lack the awareness to recognize how serious those problems are. Of even more concern is how long it takes to fix a faulty pipeline.
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Creating a Sales Culture
- April 28, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
So what are the challenges a company will face when management decides to create a more proactive sales culture?
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Is He or Isn’t He?
- April 27, 2005
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A company that wanted to evaluate their sales organization was having a not so uncommon identity crisis: their sales managers don’t have any salespeople reporting to them. What’s wrong with that you ask? Five things: