Search Results

  • Baseball, The Toad and Coaching Unresponsive Salespeople

    • April 11, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    resistant salesperson

    Coaching salespeople is challenging.  When they aren’t responsive to coaching it’s not only more difficult, it is downright frustrating. When you’re attempting to coach unresponsive salespeople to use the phone to directly talk with a decision maker, there isn’t much upside.  Whether you’ve made this coaching attempt one time or one hundred times, the outcome will be the same, so the question we should be asking is, should this salesperson still be working for you?

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  • Whipped Cream! The Easiest Way to Lower Sales Resistance

    • February 13, 2024
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    whipped cream

    Most sales training fails to address the single most important condition of a sales cycle – resistance – thereby rendering the sales training semi-useless.  When resistance appears, it does not matter if the sales process, methodology, tactics and strategies are good or even great, unless salespeople are equally great at lowering the resistance. 

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  • My Latest on Using Email to Book New Meetings

    • November 29, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    Email to Book Meetings

    Salespeople have been spoiled by inbound leads, outbound emails, and BDRs generating leads for them.  As a result, those in sales for fewer than ten years never learned how and suck at cold calling.  Those who used to cold call but have since stopped, forgot how to and also suck at cold calling.

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  • The 10 Avoidable Things That Occur When Salespeople Don’t Talk about Money

    • September 27, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    discussing money

    The table above uses data from Objective Management Group (OMG), which has assessed close to 2.4 million salespeople.  The data shows that 43% of all salespeople are uncomfortable talking about money and while the top 10% have no such problem, 71% of the bottom 10% are too uncomfortable to talk about money.  These are the 10 things that happen when salespeople are uncomfortable with the finance-specific milestones of the sales process:

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  • Rainforests and Torn ACL’s Provide Insight into Effective Selling

    • July 17, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    rainforest

    Only Dave Kurlan can take a torn ACL, rainforests and climate change and use those as analogies for sales effectiveness!

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  • Snowstorm & Weather Apps Explain Why 75% of Sales Forecasts are Wrong

    • March 16, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    As a Nor’Easter barreled across Central Massachusetts today, a few interesting storm-related happenings were analogous to some sales-related occurrences. This article will explore two weather-related analogies:

    It’s in 3D – Dinger the Dog and his choice of Doors
    The Magic of Weather Apps

    I’ve written about Dinger, our six-year-old Golden Doodle, several times.  The most popular article was when I claimed and proved that Dinger’s listening skills were better than those of salespeople. 

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  • Do You Know the Accurate Reason Why a Salesperson Is Not Performing?

    • April 20, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    How quickly can you determine why a salesperson is failing? 

    Dinger loves to play catch with his ball.  He has seven of them but loves his white ball the most.  When we’re out playing catch and I point to a ball and say, “there it is” or “right there” or “get it” he just can’t seem to find it!  Dinger has good listening skills but his ability to see the obvious isn’t very good.

    Such was the case earlier this week when a surprised client wanted an explanation for why one of their salespeople, who does not perform very well, scored well on his evaluation.  “How can someone who is not my top performer score better than someone who is my top performer?”

    That sounded like a challenge so I said, “Let’s go!”

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  • Top Sales Videos and Rants From Dave Kurlan

    • March 21, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    From time to time I record impromptu unscripted rants as well as some that are more well thought-out videos.  From among the collection presented below, most are rants so the rants are much more popular.  The most-watched (I have added to the list so there are more than 10 now!) videos are shown below in order of popularity and while I like all of them, I indicated my personal favorites with an asterisk.  All but three of the videos are three-minutes or less, one is six-minutes, one is ten-minutes and one is eight-minutes.  Topics include:

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  • The Top 10% of All Salespeople are 4,000% Better at this than the Bottom 10%

    • March 3, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I found Dinger with his nose glued to my front bumper where some of the deer’s hair was still attached to my car.  Dinger, who loves to bark at deer from the safety of our home, seemed to be saying, “Ohhhh, so THIS is what a deer smells like!”

    The exact same thing happened to a salesperson I was training.  It wasn’t a deer or a dog, it was about Jim’s sales aha moment.

    His team was asked to send me an email with their five biggest lessons from their first six months of training.  Among Jim’s top five was this one:

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