Search Results
-
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?
-
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?
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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:
-
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:
-
Hiring Salespeople is Like Baseball Expansion
- January 14, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Hiring salespeople is scalable until you get to a dilution point – very similar to the expansion that took place in baseball. When I was growing up in the 1960’s, there were 16 teams and expansion made it 20. Today, there are 30 teams and despite integrating more African American players, then Latin players and now Asian players, there isn’t enough pitching or depth on most teams. Pitchers with ERA’s above 5.00, who never would have made it to a major league team 40 years ago, make 40-50 appearances a year. And hitters that can’t run, throw or catch, but hit home runs from the cleanup spot as designated hitters, would never have risen beyond the minor leagues back then.
-
Leading a Sales Force is Even More Like Baseball
- November 6, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve written plenty about the similarity betwen baseball and selling, but today I’m writing about the similarity between baseball and sales leadership. If you’re not a baseball person, you might not see the same things that I see, most of which can be applied to leading a sales force. For example,
-
Baseball, Sales Cycles, and the Quest for Shorter
- September 23, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In selling, there are even more options for shortening the sales cycle. They include: