Understanding the Sales Force

  • Personality Tests, Sales Candidate Selection – How Tests Measure Up

    • June 17, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    As with costumes, you only need to take off the mask and you’ll see what’s underneath.  No exceptions.  No apologies.

    Personality tests aren’t predictive either.  Oh, they say that they are?  Then why is their validation of choice “construct validity” rather than “predictive validity”?

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  • Baseball and Selling Revisited – A Powerful Analogy

    • June 12, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A salesperson tells you about a great-looking opportunity that has been forecast to close this month.  “We’re definitely getting this and it’s an awesome opportunity for us.  We’re going to knock this one out of the park!”

    At the end of the month, the deal hasn’t closed and you question your salesperson about it.  You are told that the decision-maker has been away on vacation, but as soon as he returns, the deal is sure to get done.

    A month later, nothing has changed.  This time, the salesperson admits that he has had a little difficulty reaching the decision-maker, but he is sure that nothing has changed.  You are assured that everything is good.

    Six months later, when the deal still hasn’t closed, you force the salesperson to archive the opportunity with the salesperson still not understanding what went wrong.

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  • Sales Leadership Observations about Pipeline and Terminations

    • June 3, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It gets a bit scary when people who are experts in one thing write about another.  Today’s example was sent to me by OMG partner Mike Shannon.  He sent along a recent BtoBonline.com post by Jeff Perkins.  Jeff suggests that the sales funnel is a thing of the past, but his examples, and therefore reasons, are way off base.  He seems confused about what the sales pipeline or funnel is supposed to do for us.  

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  • Inc Magazine Gets it Wrong on Sales Prospecting

    • May 31, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In his article, he shares a systematic approach for prospecting “loosely based upon a conversation with Thomas Ray Crowel.”  My interpretation of his use of the word “loosely” is that he contributed his own opinions to this systematic approach.  That makes the article all the more disappointing.

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  • Sabermetrics for Sales Leadership – Projecting Sales Revenue

    • May 28, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    What if there was a way to project sales success even more so than what Objective Management Group has mastered during the past 23 years?

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  • Everyone Can Sell. Not Really. Top 10 Reasons Why Not

    • May 22, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Dan Pink, Author of To Sell is Human, has been getting a lot of well-deserved exposure.  He wrote a terrific book and most who have read it, really like it.  I don’t have a problem with his book because read in its entirety, it makes sense.  I do have an issue with the people who write about his book and take the concept, that everyone can sell, out of context.  The context is that everyone can sell their ideas.  Agreed.  But out of context, it is suggested that everyone can be a salesperson.  I strongly disagree.

    Forget for a moment all of the data from Objective Management Group showing that 74% of all professional salespeople suck.  When we take the concept from selling an idea (at home, at church, in the neighborhood or internally to coworkers) to professional selling, 10 things change:

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  • Salespeople Must Stop Snorkeling and Start Scuba Diving

    • May 15, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    We talk a lot about the importance of using a consultative approach instead of a transactional approach to better differentiate and sell value instead of price.  When we explain consultative selling, we usually emphasize the importance of listening and questioning.  When we further explain effective listening and questioning, it becomes much more difficult to describe in a paragraph or in the absence of a demonstration or role-play.

    Until today.

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  • Impact of Sales Process Versus Sales Coaching

    • May 14, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    While most sales leaders admit that they must be more effective at coaching, many who said they have some kind of sales process in place didn’t come to the same conclusion.  So, why is it so obvious to sales leaders that they need to improve their coaching, but so elusive that they need to improve their sales process?  

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  • Top 10 Reasons Why Salespeople Let Price Drive the Sale

    • May 10, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Selling value.

    What comes so easily to the top 6% and some of the top 26% is so very difficult for others.

    Most salespeople have little capability to effectively build value. Talking about what your company does better or differently or telling a prospect what your value proposition is does not build value. Instead, value comes from 3 things:

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  • Is the “Lack of Commitment to Sales Success” Finding Predictive?

    • May 7, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    So you have your sales force evaluated and in addition to learning why you are getting the results you are getting, and what you can do to significantly improve those results, you are surprised by some of the individual findings on some of your salespeople.  One of the findings that generates the most push-back is Lack of Commitment to sales success.

    We could hear any of the following comments as push-back to this finding:

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