Search Results
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Sales Lessons from Baseball’s 2013 World Series
- October 29, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Instead of bad or wrong calls and decisions, I believe that it’s critical to frame decisions that don’t go our way as tough decisions rather than bad or wrong decisions. “Bad” is a judgment and leads to debate, while “tough” forces us to move on to lessons learned and action steps. It is far more productive.
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Sales Coaching Lessons from the Baseball Files
- May 24, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This sequence of analysis and tweaking works in exactly the same way when coaching salespeople. You should be able to immediately identify what went wrong, when it went wrong, how it went wrong and demonstrate how to prevent and fix it. The last two steps must take place through role-play. Are you doing that effectively?
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Ominous Signs for Sales Teams and Baseball Can Help
- April 15, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It seems like a recession is on our doorstep. Most salespeople haven’t experienced selling in a recession since 2009, fifteen years ago. That means there are few experienced recession-proof salespeople, plus those who didn’t figure out how to succeed at recessionary selling back then as well.
What are the twelve biggest challenges?
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Baseball, The Toad and Coaching Unresponsive Salespeople
- April 11, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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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The Powerful Similarity Between Bad Baseball Teams and Most Sales Teams
- April 17, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Stop using revenue to rank your salespeople or to conclude that your salespeople with the most revenue are good salespeople. It’s fiction. It’s BS. It’s misinformation. It will lead you to make bad decisions. Revenue represents what customers spend with you. Sales effectiveness is the measure of a salesperson’s ability to grow revenue by bringing in new business.
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This Company’s Best Salesperson was 2500% Stronger Than Their Worst
- February 1, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s been four months since the baseball season ended but college baseball begins in less than 4 weeks and it will be fun to watch our son play for his college team (while freezing our asses off!). It’s also been a while since the last time I shared a top/bottom analysis but I completed one this week that I had to share.
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Great Sales Managers are Like Great Baseball Coaches Without the Screaming
- March 15, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The biggest difference between great sales managers and crappy sales managers is how effectively they coach up their salespeople to make them better. There are two parts to this:
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How Gas Grills, Gardening, Masks, and Baseball Mimic Your Sales Team
- May 3, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My project corresponds so well with how many executives approach their sales teams.
They do nothing for years, and then, after growing frustrated with complacency and inability to grow revenue, finally decide to make changes and rebuild their sales teams.
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The Baseball Experience That Continues to Generate a 28% Increases in Sales
- February 10, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The challenge isn’t whether or not they’ll enjoy and benefit greatly from the training. The challenge is getting sales leaders to attend the training! There’s a little matter of ego. Most successful sales leaders have fairly large egos and while their egos helped spur them on to their current roles, now that they’re in their current roles, their egos sometimes obstruct their ability to improve, ask for help, and bring professional training into their companies. The voice in their head whispers thoughts like:
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Sales is Like Baseball and Baseball Can Save Capitalism and Liberty
- July 18, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Before you think that this applies only to youth baseball teams, I want to be clear. Sales teams are like this too. In the past 35 years I have personally trained hundreds of sales teams and tens of thousands of salespeople and sales teams always have the same 8 salespeople: