Understanding the Sales Force
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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.
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Top 10 Indicators That You Have a Trustworthy Sales Prospect
- April 28, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
there are some indicators that we can identify, to help salespeople have a better handle on whether the prospect is being honest and whether or not they will buy. But these are not replacements for instinct. These indicators do not change the facts, they cannot move the opportunity to another stage of the pipeline or sales process, and they cannot alter the probability of closing. They are simply indicators:
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Double Article Friday and the Death of All Selling Forever
- April 25, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There is no doubt that selling has changed – a lot – but the marketers who most benefit from telling you that it has changed to the point where you should not sell anymore are simply trying to get you to buy their stuff!
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What the Sales World Can Learn from Marathon Participants
- April 23, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While some professional runners enter a marathon, more than 30,000 people were simply participating because they could. These participants have full-time jobs, careers and businesses. This is a hobby. Yet their commitment to this hobby should be embarrassing to most salespeople, who don’t put forth anywhere near this level of commitment, effort, time or practice into their own career!
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Benchmarking Salespeople Sounds Great but Has Many Flaws
- April 21, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You want to hire better salespeople, don’t you? And you’ve been told that if you use a sales assessment, you will be able to select better salespeople, right? And if you have a strong HR background, you may believe that benchmarking is a good first step. There are many uses for benchmarking in sales, and while the approach taken by most assessment companies helps them, it doesn’t really help you.