Baseball and Sales
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The Powerful Similarity Between Bad Baseball Teams and Most Sales Teams
- April 17, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, 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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The Philosophy of the Red Sox and Gallop Will Lead to Increased Revenue
- March 30, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Leadership believed they were very good at doing these things. However, everything is relative. The key question is, good compared to who?
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New Data: Will Salespeople Hit Quota When Sales Managers Coach and Sell?
- November 7, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Instead of spending their time on coaching, sales managers are spending too much of their time on personal sales. Sales managers with fewer than 5 salespeople may be required to carry a quota but generally speaking, sales managers are expected to spend no more than 5% of their time selling. OMG’s data shows that the percentage of time that sales managers sell is closer to 13%.
Why do they sell instead of having more coaching conversations? There are several reasons:
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How Closing a Tough Sale is Nearly Identical to Hitting a Home Run
- August 25, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
You’re watching a baseball game on television and the announcer says, “And here’s the pitch and there’s a long drive hit deep to left field and it’s deep, it’s up, it’s way back and GONE!!!!! Home Run Dave Kurlan!” OK, the announcer never said the Dave Kurlan part. Not even close. I was a singles hitter. And I never played at a level that had announcers. So there’s that. For entertainment sake, watch this classic 2-minute clip of Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs hitting the magical home run at the end of the movie, The Natural, one of my all-time favorite baseball movies right up there with The Sandlot and Field of Dreams.
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Which is Worse – The Boston Red Sox or Your Sales Team?
- August 23, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
The construction of the Red Sox roster is simply a Stupid as Shit Strategy or SaSS. Use of the word strategy means that it’s intentional and is a disservice to the word stupid!
Sales team construction usually lacks formal strategy and that suggests something accidental is at play. We tend to see the “we already had these salespeople” and then “these are the new salespeople who were willing to work for us.” New is a relative term as the newest 30% of the team continues to churn when and if they find candidates.
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5 Steps to Grow Sales by 33% in 12 Months
- May 11, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Sales teams go through periods like this too but sales leaders rarely seek out the data that would immediately point to the real problem. They tend to hope things will improve and go from there. However, there are several levels of data to be reviewed so let’s take a look.
As the article title suggests, there are five steps you must take to grow sales by 33% in 12 months. You can’t pick and choose as all five are required.
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The Philosophy of a Pitching Coach Will Improve Your Sales Team
- April 4, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
I find ideas and material for this Blog everywhere, especially when I’m not looking for them. Yesterday I received a daily email from a Paul Reddick, a baseball coach who was drumming up some business for his baseball institute. It resonated – not for its baseball coaching – but as sales coaching. Here’s what it said:
If your coach is talking about any of the pitching flaws that you see listed above…
Run… Run Fast!
That Coach is working on “flaws” that will have no impact on your pitching. He is working on symptoms… not the illness! He is trying to fix things that are happening as a byproduct of incorrect movement early in your delivery. If you get the first second of your delivery right, almost all of these flaws get fixed instantly.
Do you know how this applies to sales?
I’ll explain exactly how it applies and I promise you will be surprised! Click here to read last year’s fun article comparing pitcher’s fielding practice (PFP) to role-playing in sales.
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Great Sales Managers are Like Great Baseball Coaches Without the Screaming
- March 15, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, 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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Has Buying Changed and Has B2B Selling Adapted?
- January 5, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Today’s buyers are self-educated and salespeople mistake that knowledge for readiness. Salespeople tend to take the path of least resistance and the knowledge they mistake for readiness lulls them into the quote, proposal and order taking mode. As a result, they don’t follow their company’s sales process or worse, the company’s sales process has been modified to reflect buyers being ready. If the buyers were truly ready at this point they would actually buy but the additional options prolong instead of shorten the sales process.
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Most Salespeople are Underdogs Like the Boston Red Sox
- October 13, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
If your company is not the brand leader, market leader, or price leader; if you have a complex sale, a story to tell, a new technology, a new brand, a new product, a much higher price or a much tougher sale, then you are an underdog too.
