Baseball and Sales
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Crucial Selling Take Aways from the 2017 Home Run Derby Lead to Sales Greatness
- July 12, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Did you watch the Home Run Derby on Monday night? I’ve never seen anything like it. You could see thunder and lightening through the glass wall in left field as thunderstorms raged while all the home runs were being launched. Wow, what a show! Of course, my mind always looks for a correlation to selling and there are some good ones here.
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How to Simplify Coaching Salespeople
- May 19, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
When you take sales coaching, baseball, watching video and put it all together, what do you get?
You get the post-call debrief – the most powerful tool for great sales coaching.
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What Sales Managers Do That Make Them So Ineffective
- July 26, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Earlier this week I wrote an article on why so many sales managers are so bad. In today’s article, I’ll share what makes them so ineffective. The easiest way to explain this is to start with a baseball analogy.
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Top 5 Conditions For B2B Prospects to Buy Your Services
- March 15, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Best Top 10 Lists, Understanding the Sales Force
So first a little baseball and then the sales analogy. A fastball hit me square in the knee today.
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Part 4 – The Real Story Behind the Sales Selection Fiasco
- October 21, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
This week we discovered a statistical difference between those salespeople who currently work for a company whose sales force was evaluated, and those sales candidates who were applying for sales positions.
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Sales Slumps – What Causes Them and How to Fix Them
- September 28, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
During the course of a baseball season, both hitters and pitchers fall into slumps. In basketball, players slump with their outside shots and from the foul line. Football Quarterbacks go into passing slumps. Golf and Tennis pros have swing slumps. Tiger has been in a slump since Thanksgiving of 2009! (I’m sure there must be some kind of a slump that Soccer players can fall victim to, but I don’t know enough about soccer to weigh in.) With slumps being so common, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that salespeople get into slumps too. In this article, we’ll explore what causes salespeople to get into slumps, what their slumps look like, and how can they be fixed.
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How the Right Questions Can Make up for Lack of Sales Experience
- August 11, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Magic, racing and expectations are major factors in sales. We will discuss the role of each and how salespeople can be more consistent when they better understand those 3 factors and learn to manage them.
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Why Some Great Salespeople Produce and Others Don’t
- June 18, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
I was talking with someone who wanted his farmers – salespeople who are assigned to a single enterprise account – to hunt. His idea is to take existing salespeople and have them bring on new accounts instead of hiring additional salespeople to do that. There are certainly pros and cons to that, but do you think it will work? What would it take? What are the chances? If it works, can it be replicated? Let’s take an inside look at the factors, chances and reasons, shall we?
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How to Finally Get Sales Selection Right
- June 16, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Before I share some crucial sales selection tips, I need to begin with some baseball. My apologies to all of my cricket and soccer obsessed readers.
My team, the Boston Red Sox, just lost their seventh consecutive game. They are in last place and heading for their third last place finish in the past four years. The outlier year was 2013, when they won the World Series. I think there was far less talent on that championship team than on this year’s edition, but the 2013 team had a rallying cry (Boston Strong) and everyone overachieved. You can’t count on everyone overachieving each year, so in lieu of that, as Jim Collins would say, you must have the right people in the right seats.
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Should a Salesperson be Punished after a Huge Sale?
- May 4, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
My wife and I watched with a combination of fascination, sadness and shock as the coach of our son’s 12 and under AAU baseball team made them run suicides after the double header they won on Saturday, and again after the double header they won on Sunday. Why would he punish them after winning four games this weekend? And how does this apply to sales? You’ll be amazed by what you read.
