Understanding the Sales Force
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Persistence Over Polish – What the Top 10% of All Salespeople Do Better
- March 12, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The best athletes in the world know exactly how they do the things they do that make them so great. In addition to their God-given talent, they outworked everyone else to master the mechanics and nuances of their sport, the mindset required for greatness, and competed at a high level from a very young age. When they falter they can easily make the adjustments necessary to get back on track.
Interestingly, most top salespeople don’t know what it is that they do that makes them so successful! That’s surprise #1. If you look through the data on the 2,.3 million salespeople that Objective Management Group (OMG) has assessed, you will see that the top 10% of all salespeople have better average scores than their colleagues in each of the 21 Sales Core Competencies. Their average scores are listed below for 5 Sales Core Competencies in which they have the best scores. They are:
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10 Ways to Determine if Your Sales Prospect was Engaged
- March 8, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A sales manager asking, “So, how did your meeting go?”
The salesperson always replies, “It went great.” It’s the same response a retail clerk gets when they ask shoppers if they need any help. “Just looking.” “It went great.” It’s the default answer.
The sales manager says, “Good, good.”
I wish that sales managers wouldn’t ask how meetings and calls went. They should say,
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What Happens When You Force a Square Sales Peg into a Round Sales Hole?
- March 2, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Can you imagine attaching a snow plow to a Lamborghini and hiring yourself out to clear parking lots? Back in April I wrote about our new puppy. Now he’s 1-year old and has grown to 60 pounds, but could you imagine putting a saddle on him and selling rides on the beach? Could you imagine if the US arsenal of nuclear weapons consisted of putting 1,000’s of firecrackers into a plastic cylinder and then saying to North Korea, “try us!”
These are all examples of trying to put a square peg into a round hole – things you just don’t do. And that’s how I felt when I received an email asking how to deal with the following sales challenge.
The reader asked me to write an article explaining how to improve the sales effectiveness of their mostly altruistically motivated salespeople.
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Would You Like to be Selling Guns Right Now?
- February 27, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
What if you sell for a company whose products are not reliable, lack the latest and greatest features, aren’t a good fit, or don’t have competitive pricing? That would suck, wouldn’t it? What if you sell for one of America’s 20 Most Hated Companies? That would suck too. But those sales organizations are not disintegrating, their salespeople are not heading for the doors and their revenues are not in a nosedive. Most of the outrage, hate, and reputation-killing is taking place in the media, not with their customers.
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Glue – The Missing Element That Makes Every Sales Training Initiative Successful
- February 26, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I find that even the most seasoned and resistant of salespeople get to this point: When they realize how much more there is to selling, how much more effective they can be, how much more business they could generate, how they don’t need to have the best price, and how much easier selling can be, they become eager learners. That brings us to the question to be answered in today’s article: If most salespeople become eager learners and embrace good sales training, why don’t all companies experience equally tremendous revenue growth from sales training?
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Can Sales Statistics be Bad and Good at the Same Time?
- February 21, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I received two pieces of bad news relative to statistics.
The first is about my award-winning Blog. It seems that readers stay with an article for an average of only one-minute or so. That means that most readers don’t finish the article, fail to get to my summary, and often don’t read long enough to get my point. Basically, everything that comes after the fourth paragraph is not being read. This could also be good news. It could mean that I can actually write shorter articles and that would be great for me!
The other piece of bad news relates to my award-winning sales training company, Kurlan & Associates. I reviewed 5 years worth of statistics on opportunities that weren’t closed and it seems that prospects were 6 times more likely to do nothing than to do business with a competitor. We don’t lose very often and I can count on two hands the number of opportunities I have personally lost in the past 5 years. But it’s one thing to rarely lose, and another to learn that 6 times more often than not, a company failed to act. But these statistics are very misleading. Let me explain why.
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Easiest Way to Assess Degree of Sales Success
- February 13, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Recently, I published an article that introduced a way to measure sales progress by means other than conventional numbers and metrics.
Today, I received an email from a property leasing salesperson who had his own question about sales effectiveness. He asked, “How do I determine if I am seeing results from me being a good salesman or if it’s from my sheer volume and what kind of selling would you say a Real Estate Salesperson uses most?”
I explained that there are four types of sales conversations and by conducting some self-analysis you can determine whether success or failure is the result of your own effectiveness, or because of your company’s reputation, quality and features of your product or service, the timing of your conversation, or that you happen to have the lowest price.
These are the four types of sales conversations and potential outcomes that I shared:
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What Salespeople Can Learn from Josh McDaniels Gutsy Reversal
- February 9, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
What compelling reason might your prospect have for changing their mind? Let’s assume that they won’t reverse their decision if they were happy with the incumbent vendor and decided to remain with them. But they could change their mind if you were in the mix the entire way and on this opportunity they decided to go with your primary competitor. How would you do it?
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Is the Sales Force Getting Dressed Up or are Real Changes Taking Place?
- February 7, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday I received an email from Richardson Training, letting me know that they have completed their 2018 Selling Challenges Study. The data in the report, which you can download here, hasn’t changed a great deal since 2017, but the report’s new look is awesome. I reported on last year’s report in detail here, but my conclusion for 2018 is the exact same conclusion I came to in 2017.
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Measure Change in Sales Effectiveness without Numbers and Metrics
- February 2, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We want to get better at selling and as sales leaders we want our salespeople to improve. We need them to improve. We hope that training and coaching and sales ennablement tools will get us there. We have also been told that there is more than one way to skin a cat but it might come as a surprise that there is more than one way to measure the progress being made by your salespeople.
There are traditional lagging indicators, like revenue generated, and there are traditional forward looking indicators, like new meetings, pipeline value and pipeline quantity compared to a prior period. Conversion ratios – calls to meetings, meetings to qualified opportunities, qualified opportunities to closable, and win rates, all compared with the same ratios from a prior period.
These metrics tell a story, individually and together, but forward looking indicators tell a more timely story, especially if you have a long sales cycle. However, as you’ll read below, measuring sales progress doesn’t stop with metrics because there is another powerful way to get instant feedback on a salesperson’s progress.