Understanding the Sales Force
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The Sales Conversation CEO’s & Sales VP’s Must Have with HR
- June 2, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I had to laugh when I was told that our assessment was “correct in not recommending” her for the sales position at her company, but “the other assessment was a more accurate description” of her.
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Key to Significantly Improve Sales Training Results
- May 28, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The best players, getting the advanced instruction on the travel teams, improve the most. Those same kids, on their regular season team, learn almost nothing new and aren’t challenged or pushed. Practice, and sometimes even the games, can be so boring for them that they don’t play their very best.
Translation from Baseball to Selling
If we translate all of that baseball to selling, the only two things that change are the activity and the age of the people being coached and trained.
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Case History – Achieve Lowest Turnover in the Entire Sales Force
- May 27, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Why would an enterprise (that has standardized on OMG’s Sales Candidate Assessment, had OMG customize it for every sales role in the company, and has terrific data from its first year of use) have one department with significantly lower turnover than all the others?
Could it be any of the following 10 Reasons?
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Finding the Right Sales and Sales Management Candidates
- May 22, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Seven years ago, a company may have wanted sales managers who were task masters, holding salespeople accountable to top of the funnel metrics. While that could still be true today, a company should be looking for a sales manager who is an extremely effective sales coach, who spends 50% of the available time coaching and developing salespeople.
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Top 5 Reasons Sales Prospects Ask for References
- May 19, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Everything is going along great, your prospect seems quite interested, they’ve agreed with your points, accepted your pushback, you got them qualified and you’re heading for the home stretch.
It doesn’t matter if this has all occurred in the last 45 minutes, or if this took place over a series of meetings, calls and months.
They ask for references.
The best example of doing a lousy job in this area is the salesperson who was referred in, yet still gets asked for references!
How a salesperson handles the request for references is crucial and most salespeople screw it up royally.
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A Hidden Weakness that Makes Salespeople Procrastinate
- May 15, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, I was on three separate calls with sales managers whose salespeople needed to fill their pipelines, but hadn’t. They needed those salespeople to schedule meetings, but they weren’t doing it. They needed those salespeople to make calls, but they wouldn’t make them. They needed to get those salespeople moving, but those salespeople were stuck.
For the salespeople, it was their own doing. Self-imposed. And they knew it!
Would you like to know which mysterious, hidden weakness was holding them hostage, preventing them from taking the action they knew was crucial to their success?
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Top 10 Problems with Channel Sales – Don’t be Held Hostage
- May 9, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The salespeople charged with selling to and through a channel are different – in many ways – and their goals, expectations, activities, skill sets and strategies must be different as well.
When we work with companies selling through channels, the sales processes, metrics, sales management, sales coaching, sales training, messaging and coaching must be different from what we do with direct B2B sales forces. Channel sales is quite different.
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Can These 5 Keys Determine the Fate of Cold Calling?
- May 7, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When marketers and writers tell us that cold calling is dead, they never remember to qualify what they are trying to sell us. The amount of death in cold calling is dependent on a number of variables that never seem to be discussed. If we take a good hard look at these variables, we can see that taking a broad brush stroke to cold calling is a mistake:
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The Best Top 10 Lists for Sales and Sales Management
- May 5, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Over the years, I have written the occasional Top 5, Top 10 and Top 20 Articles and they are now in a series of their own.
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Sales Blogging – Do As I Say, Not as I Do
- May 1, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s a big problem with many of the sales blogs you read. One-person sales consulting firms, self-appointed experts, telling, but not doing, what they say.