Analogies

  • How To Stop Sucking by Understanding and Changing Your Sales Metrics
    • August 30, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    Suppose a company reports that its win rate is 24%.  Does that tell you anything other than they suck?  It doesn’t tell us how badly they suck, why they suck, how long they’ve sucked, who sucks, or whether there is any hope for them to stop sucking.  And even if their win rate is double the 24%, the same questions apply. Let me explain.

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  • Follow This Advice to Schedule More Meetings and Spend Less Time Doing It
    • August 25, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    Regular readers know that I’m all about the data and I have written nearly two thousand articles based on data from Objective Management Group’s (OMG) assessments of more than two million salespeople.  Occasionally however, I see data where incorrect conclusions have been reached and like the toad on the window, my conclusions run counter to theirs.  One such example is a beautiful infographic from sales playbook company Xant. I am going to share some of their data, graphics and conclusions and I’ll provide my counter argument to their conclusions.

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  • Nothing Beats This One Tool When You Can’t Sell Face to Face
    • August 19, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    There are some misguided selling strategies that can be undone and in today’s article we’ll discuss the benefits of the single tool that is the real deal and a huge difference maker.

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  • Siri Can’t Help You Close the Deal but Doing These Three Things Can!
    • August 9, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    Sometimes Siri doesn’t actively listen and decides to send you somewhere different from where you asked her to navigate; a different city or town and/or a place that doesn’t sound remotely close to what you asked for. She gets in the way.

    So what do you do when Siri isn’t cooperating?  Do you give up and wing it?  Do you try again?  Do you stop navigating with Siri and switch to Google, Waze or your built-in system?  Do you persist until you get what you need?

    That’s exactly what salespeople are supposed to do.  Get creative, be persistent and find a way to reach the decision maker.  You do it with Siri, so why don’t you do it when someone in the company won’t introduce you to the decision maker, when they won’t give you the decision maker’s name or when they don’t cooperate?  Why do so many salespeople give up and plow forward with the contact they are speaking with right now?

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  • Salespeople Will Close 50% More Business By Changing This One Thing They Do!
    • August 5, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    At Objective Management Group (OMG), one of the 21 Sales Core Competencies we measure and report on also tends to confuse salespeople, is the cause of frequent pushback, but has thirty-five years of cumulative science to support the finding and our conclusions.  Allow me to introduce you the competency called Supportive BuyCycleTM.

    BuyCycleTM represents how salespeople go about the process of making a major purchase and there is a 100% correlation between how they buy and the behavior they accept from their prospects.  For example:

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  • Why More Salespeople Are Being Recommended for Difficult Selling Roles
    • June 24, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    Something else we haven’t done for quite a while is revisit Objective Management Group’s (OMG) sales selection statistics on the percentage of people that are recommended for various selling and sales management roles.

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  • How Gas Grills, Gardening, Masks, and Baseball Mimic Your Sales Team
    • May 3, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Baseball and Sales, 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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  • 31 Conditions That Predict Your Sales Opportunity is in Trouble
    • April 16, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week, a crazy driver pulled out right in front of me and despite the fact that I anticipated his stupidity and would have been able to stop before smashing into this moron, my car wasn’t as certain as I was.  My Genesis took matters into its own hands and went into all out protection mode – making sure nothing happened to it or me.

    As advertised, it took over the braking and steering to protect itself, sounded all the alarms to alert me to its strategy and then did two things that really surprised me.  All at once, the seat enveloped me in a cocoon and the seat belt tightened around my shoulders so that there was no chance that I was leaving that seat.  Going through the windshield?  Not a chance unless the whole seat was coming with me!

    That was cool. 

    And it got me thinking.  Wouldn’t it be cool if salespeople had a sales version of an early warning system/driver assist like my car has?

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  • How to Become More Successful One Day at a Time
    • April 13, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    You can find inspiration anywhere.  Even in a book called, A Year of Playing Catch.  Tom Schaff was nice enough to send me a copy of this book and there was the inspiration, right there on page 128.  Why would someone from the world of sales care about a page out of a baseball book?  I’ll give you fourteen really good reasons.  You see, the book is much less about baseball and much more about the following fourteen integral competencies of sales success:

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  • Why I Believe We Should Blow up the Business Development Rep (BDR) Role in Sales
    • March 29, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force

    For decades it was normal practice for Copy Machine, Office Supply, Cell Phones, Life Insurance and Residential Real Estate companies to recruit and train (a little classroom) rookie salespeople and then have them spend years making Cold Calls.  Industries like those continue to suffer from the highest voluntary turnover rates you can imagine and the practice is not entirely different from what tech companies are doing with the BDR Role.  

    But why?  Whose brilliant idea was this?

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