Understanding the Sales Force

  • The Best Solutions for Hiring Great Salespeople for Your Company

    • August 28, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    These are all examples of inappropriate solutions to the simple question, “What is the best way to get there from here?”

    How about the simple question, “What is the best way to assure that the salespeople I am about to hire will succeed in the chosen role?”

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  • FDR and Sir Isaac Newton on Why Salespeople Fail

    • August 25, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Unlike the made up fears that prevent salespeople from asking tough questions, qualifying more thoroughly, or picking up the phone and making a cold call, the fear of burning alive in a hotel fire seemed like a pretty justifiable one.

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  • FOX News and CNN Can Help You Conduct Better Sales Opportunity Reviews

    • August 17, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I don’t really care whether or not you like, approve of, tolerate, or agree with President Trump and/or the issues he stands for.  Doesn’t matter to me.  And you shouldn’t care what I think of him or which side of that invisible center line I am on.  Shouldn’t matter to you.  While this is an article about coaching salespeople, I am going to use the current divisiveness as an analogy to help you better understand how sales leaders can have a huge impact on your salespeople.

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  • 15 Things Salespeople Must Do to Make up for a Lackluster 2nd Quarter

    • August 12, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week we moved our son into his dorm to begin his freshman year of college. The college President’s opening remarks were virtual, so we joined the Zoom stream from our hotel room and listened in.  He had some really useful things to share with the new freshmen and while his thoughts were targeted to the students, they apply quite equally to salespeople.

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  • Data Shows Sales Commitment and Motivation Changed During Quarantine

    • July 22, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Steve Taback and I started our respective sales training firms at the same time back in 1985.  We became great friends and he became the second licensee of Objective Management Group (OMG) in 1990.  He emailed me asking if I had seen a change in any of the scores of the 21 Sales Core Competencies since the Pandemic had hit.  Specifically, he was wondering if there was an increase in the number of salespeople who lacked Commitment or whose Outlook wasn’t good.

    OMG! (the other version of OMG this time)  Was he asking me to do some research on sales assessment statistics?  God, I love that!

    Damn that Steve is good.  Turns out he was right.  Below I’ll share the changes in Commitment, Outlook and Motivation, all of which fluctuated during the past several months.

    Take a look at these three screen shots which tell one part of the story.

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  • Sales is Like Baseball and Baseball Can Save Capitalism and Liberty

    • July 18, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Before you think that this applies only to youth baseball teams, I want to be clear.  Sales teams are like this too.  In the past 35 years I have personally trained hundreds of sales teams and tens of thousands of salespeople and sales teams always have the same 8 salespeople:

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  • Why it is so Difficult to Compare Sales Effectiveness from One Salesperson to Another

    • July 15, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today we’ll discuss how to measure sales effectiveness of different salespeople despite there being so many variables to confuse the matter.  You can scroll directly to that topic or, if you don’t mind, please read my 3 paragraphs of context.

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  • How to Achieve Sales Mastery – A Collection of Loosely Connected Thoughts

    • July 6, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    During our first of its kind Independence Day weekend, I thought about a lot of things that loosely tied into sales effectiveness and while they could all be articles in their own right, I decided to write one article tying them all together.

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  • New Data Reveals Interesting Differences in Salespeople’s Ability to Work From Home

    • June 25, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    John Pattison, COO of Objective Management Group (OMG), dug into OMG’s remote seller data, and learned that similar to the weather, things aren’t always what they appear to be.  The table below shows how this data changes according to sales experience.

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  • How Much Has Video Impacted the Way We Sell?

    • June 23, 2020
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In March, most salespeople were very uncomfortable conducting their business over video. Look at this article I wrote about video as recently as November!  Yet today, just three months later, 49% of salespeople prefer video to a phone call and another 28% don’t have a preference.  That’s quite a change!

    So how do salespeople feel about video?

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