Understanding the Sales Force
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What Do You Blame When Salespeople Don’t Schedule Enough New Meetings?
- May 23, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most salespeople suck on the phone. If you read that article, you learned about 10 common mistakes that salespeople make on the phone. But those are strategic and tactical mistakes – they are skill-based. What happens when you have salespeople who won’t even make calls? Could they be suffering from call reluctance? Objective Management Group (OMG) measures 21 Sales Core Competencies and one of them is the Hunter Competency.
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How Boomers and Millennials Differ in Sales
- May 18, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I hate this article already – the last thing we need is another article to help us to understand Millennials. Except for one thing. Most of you reading this are Millennials and you probably need to better understand boomers.
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4 Great Sales Lessons from a Notre Dame Commencement Ceremony
- May 17, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We were fortunate to be in the audience for the 2016 Notre Dame Commencement where Vice President Joe Biden, former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff and retired 4-Star General, Martin Dempsey were among the speakers. While all were good, Biden had one great takeaway, and the General shared 3 tips and an action step. I believe that these are all share-worthy and apply to sales and sales leadership as well, and perhaps even better than they apply to those graduating from universities.
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Are These the Best Roles for Shy People in Sales?
- May 12, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I received an email inviting me to review and share an infographic on shy people in sales. Being an introvert myself, I thought it would be interesting to check it out and see if it resonated. When I finally got around to reading it, I was surprised by several things I read…and I’m sure you’ll be surprised too…
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The 3 Most Important Questions about Sales Process and My Answers
- May 9, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
With sales process finally getting the necessary attention, we should turn our attention to the three related issues that need to be addressed. Which sales process should you select, and into which CRM application should it be integrated and how can it be customized?
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Why Salespeople Need to Negotiate and 10 Other Timely Sales Lessons
- May 5, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Regular readers know that I have written more than 1,400 articles to help them better Understand the Sales Force. Some of the articles won awards. A few were stinkers. I intended for all of them to be very helpful and I believe they are. Over the years, some of my favorite articles were completely overlooked, getting relatively few reads compared with the most popular articles that were viewed by tens of thousands of people.
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Can Free Sales Content Send You Down a Dangerous Path?
- May 2, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I downloaded a Sales Process Cheat Sheet which promised a standardized playbook and a simple, easy-to-follow sales methodology to help managers coach their inside sales reps into following a proven, standardized process from discovery to close. Was there value? It was a joint promotion from Hubspot and InsideSales.com. – maybe you received the same offer in your inbox. Was it any good? Was it a process? Was it a playbook? Was it a methodology?
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Help is Here for Salespeople Who Find Themselves as the Underdogs
- April 28, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You or your salespeople are on a call. Is it an uphill battle? Do you feel like you need some luck to win the business? Are you up against an incumbent – and your prospect is happy with them? Are there too many competitors – and you are having trouble getting noticed? Does the prospect claim to only care about price – and you aren’t the lowest? Do they just want a proposal or a quote – and you feel like you need to provide it to them? Do you have trouble winning most of the time? Do you almost always face resistance of some kind? Is it difficult to simply get a meeting?I wrote an article for the SellingPower blog where we discuss the challenges of being an underdog. Read it to now to learn how you can outsell the big companies.
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Effective Selling is Less about the Words and More About How You Say Them
- April 25, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Whether you are trying to convince a prospect, customer or salesperson, make sure you emphasize the how over the what and your message has a much better chance of being accepted in the spirit you intended.
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How Coyotes are at the Heart of Sales Motivation
- April 21, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My family lives west of Boston where it is not uncommon for us to see lots of squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, deer, the family of foxes that live on our property, and on most nights, we hear coyotes. We usually hear them in the early morning hours, and always thought they were celebrating a kill. Recently, I did some research and learned that this is how coyotes greet each other when they are assembling before going out to hunt – before the kill! For those of you who don’t live in or alongside a forest, a group of wild coyotes usually looks and sounds just like in this 1-minute video that I found on YouTube. That got me thinking about the connection to sales motivation and more.