Music and Sales
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Poison Ivy and 2 Powerful Lessons for Hiring Salespeople
- April 18, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Paul McCartney hoped it would work out with Linda in the band, and while Wings were very successful, let’s be honest. Linda would not have been hired to perform on vocals or keyboard in any other band – not even a local wedding band! Why? She was a photographer and shouldn’t have quit her day job.
We see nepotism in every family owned business where the founder/CEO/President gets the entire unqualified family involved. The family learns to adequately perform in most of the roles but the brother in charge of sales, the nephew managing major accounts, the daughter in account management, and the wife doing estimates just aren’t cutting it.
Let’s not forget the Hope part of this…
Hope is used when sales leaders interview and select sales candidates. They decide that from among the following 10 characteristics and qualifiers, the candidate:
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Shania Twain’s Lesson for Sales Leaders Who Want to Hire Stronger Salespeople
- April 14, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Instead of seeking industry experience, a degree, and related characteristics, sales leaders must vet for the ability to succeed at selling to your specific audience, at your price point, and against your competition. That one difference takes the entire sourcing, screening, vetting, interviewing, selecting, hiring, and on-boarding process and turns it upside down. Different tools. Different process. Different sourcing. Different questions. Different answers. Different results.
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Timing – A Secret Key to Sales Success
- January 9, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Books, Movies, Theater and Television, Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Timing is easy to recognize. When the timing is right anyone who calls can get a meeting scheduled. When the timing is bad, nobody who calls will get a meeting scheduled. Then there are all the occasions in the middle – the timing is neither good nor bad – where by asking the right questions and getting them to recognize they might have an issue you can help with, you do succeed at scheduling a meeting. These are the very meetings you want because early on, they aren’t talking with anyone other than you.
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Top Five Benefits of Sales Process and Methodology
- January 6, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Sales Process is a framework for consistent, predictable, repeatable results and the framework is best deployed as a staged, milestone-centric, buyer-focused sequence of events. Listen to this five-second clip from a very popular holiday song to hear the foundation of sales process come to life.
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How to Easily Motivate and Incentivize Sales Pipeline Building
- June 20, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Music motivates me to do what I otherwise don’t really want to do. But while everyone is different, I’ve seen music work as a motivator for others too.
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Use Music to Understand the 12 Criteria Prospects Use to Buy from Salespeople
- June 12, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, while watching our son play in a summer collegiate baseball game, I missed a step and tumbled all the way down the bleachers. Isn’t that a great analogy for what happens when you miss, or skip a crucial step in the sales process? More than half of all salespeople are missing and skipping important milestones in the sales process each and every day and their egos get more bruised from failing to close those opportunities than my body got bruised from my not so thrilling adventure to the ground.
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2021 Challenge: Put a Little Beatles Into Your Selling!
- January 4, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
The only thing that would make the Beatles different today is technology. The sound quality would be SO much better. It wouldn’t change their songs but the songs would sound better. It wouldn’t eliminate the work they did to write the songs but they would get the songs transcribed and notated more quickly. They would still have to record their music but the recording would be digital which would make mixing much easier.
Isn’t this all pretty much the same as sales? Let’s take a run-through.
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School of Rock the Musical Demonstrates Selling to Existing Customers and Customer Service
- February 16, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
This weekend we had seats to the new Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway show, School of Rock. Our son has watched the original movie around a dozen times and didn’t think there was the slightest possibility that the show would be as good as the movie. Did the show meet expectations? I’ll share that in a moment, but first, let’s discuss the dynamic of the show versus the movie and compare that to an ongoing sales challenge. While salespeople have expectations for meeting outcomes and sales results, prospects have expectations too – for the meetings, salespeople, products, services, prices and terms that a company will provide at various times during your sales cycle. In the case of movie versus show, there is a better analogy to strategic account management and even customer service.
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How Music Can Definitely Help You Sell More
- March 18, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Salespeople Like Children, Understanding the Sales Force
Next week, I have a special treat for my readers. I will post an article that features my least read articles of all time – sounds very exciting, doesn’t it? While I was looking for the least read articles, I consistently came across a whole bunch of my articles that were related to music.
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Music and Selling – There are Many More Similarities Than You Think
- August 22, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Music and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
It appears that I have written enough articles about music and selling to include a series about the connection. One of the constants in the music business is that the artists must choose between writing and recording songs that are either consistent with what made them famous (giving their core audience more of what they want) or adapting and creating music which would appeal to a potentially newer audience (and perhaps alienating their core audience.) I think that Paul Simon chose the latter and alienated everyone!
