Understanding the Sales Force

  • 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.

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  • Is This an Example of Succeeding or Failing at Inside Sales?

    • April 18, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It’s bad enough when companies move to the demo too quickly, but it doesn’t get any faster or more transactional than when they ask you if you’ve seen their demo with their very first question.  But hey, give him a break.  At least he asked a question instead of telling me he wanted me to see a demo…

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  • Is There a Lack of Clarity on the Current State of Selling?

    • April 14, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Without question, the internet, inbound marketing, and social selling have replaced traditional sales – IN CERTAIN AREAS.  But they are relatively small areas and most B2B sellers will NEVER, EVER find themselves in that situation.

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  • Could it Really be The Death of SPIN Selling?

    • April 10, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The author wrote that since most prospects today know what they want, they won’t rehash all of the needs and decisions that got them to this point, and as a result, a salesperson won’t be able to back them up to an earlier stage of the sales process to implement SPIN or any other questioning strategy.

    Well, maybe.

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  • Are Inside Sales and Consultative Selling Mutually Exclusive?

    • April 7, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In this discussion, we’ll focus on group #2, traditional inside sales, where salespeople field incoming calls from existing loyal customers, existing disloyal customers, and potential customers.

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  • Rejection – Why it is the #1 Enemy in Modern Selling

    • April 3, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    For a change, rather than contributing to all the noise about inbound replacing outbound, inside replacing outside, insights replacing sales steps, buyers’ process replacing sales process, let’s talk about something that has a huge, relevant impact on selling, regardless of how the opportunity came to be.

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  • The Real Impact of Coaching Your Salespeople, Sales Managers

    • April 1, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’m in the middle of another page-turner, this one called The Man Who Killed Kennedy – The Case Against LBJ.  It’s difficult to put a positive spin on this amazing, insightful book, about one of the biggest assholes the USA has ever known, but I can take two unintentional sales-related lessons from the book:  

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