Understanding the Sales Force
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My Latest Sales Epiphany From Watching Playoff Baseball
- October 20, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
And that’s when it hit me as if I was hit in the face by a 95 MPH fastball.
My fears are exclusive to the Red Sox and not to any other team – even if I am rooting for the other team! This is huge! And because this is my brain, this is actually about sales, not baseball!
Is it fair to believe that a Sales Leader wants his salesperson to succeed with a big, important sales opportunity as much as I would want the Red Sox relief pitcher to succeed in a big, important game?
If your answer is yes, we have a problem.
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The Magic of Third Generation Sales Playbooks
- October 16, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Sales Process, Understanding the Sales Force
Do you have any 8-Track or cassette tapes lying around? What about CDs and DVDs? CDs and DVDs are a generation old, cassettes are two generations old, and 8 tracks are three generations old. While vinyl is four generations old, it is making a comeback with a niche audience of audiophiles.
Although we stream nearly all of our media now, movies, television series and music are stronger than ever. It’s only the method of watching and listening that have changed.
Take sales playbooks. At Kurlan & Associates, we used to spend months writing sales playbooks for clients and they had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the work product. And the worst part was that unlike music, TV and movies, the playbooks would not be used. They would sit on a shelf, collecting dust, and later, sit on a hard drive or in the cloud, with very few eyeballs paying attention. What a waste!
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The Biblical Sales Force Part 2 – On Boarding and Coaching Salespeople
- October 14, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Bible and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
As I wrote in September, I’m reading the Bible from beginning to end for the first time. In my first article using an analogy from the Bible, I wrote about scaling, hiring and firing salespeople, based on what I read in Genesis. Today’s article is about on boarding and coaching salespeople, and is an analogy from Exodus.
Early in Exodus, we are introduced to Moses, whose people have been slaves to Pharaoh and the Egyptians for hundreds of years. God appears to Moses and commands him to approach Pharaoh and persuade him to release the Israelites so they can freely worship their God. Moses lacks confidence in his ability to articulate the request, and questions God’s direction. He wonders if there might be someone better to handle this important assignment.
God had to build Moses’ confidence, and properly prepare him for the conversation he will have with Pharaoh. This is the equivalent to pre-call strategizing, one of several methods for coaching salespeople. God needed to provide Moses with talking points sufficient to give him gravitas with Pharaoh, so he provided Moses the God-like ability to turn his brother Aaron’s staff into a snake. We accomplish the same thing when we prepare a salesperson with powerful messaging and talking points.
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7-Steps to Achieve Sales Team Excellence
- October 9, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Baseball and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Any company and/or executive can initiate a sales transformation, but there is one dealbreaker that can cause a sales transformation initiative to fail. But you have to see it through. You must be visible. You must lead by example. You must be engaged. You must show how important this is. You must show your commitment.
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Cold Reach Outs: Do Email and LinkedIn Work?
- October 6, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most marketing workflows and the messages created for those workflows absolutely suck! As a result, most of the cold messages that come through your email and LinkedIn messages are quickly and deliberately deleted. But there’s hope for something better.
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The Biblical Sales Team Part 1 – Hiring and Firing Salespeople
- September 29, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Bible and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Given that God used terminations to achieve his goals and eliminate mistakes, there should be no reason that sales leaders can’t better utilize terminations. More than 50% of all salespeople don’t meet annual quotas and haven’t for years. They should be terminating salespeople at scale, but instead, scared sales leaders create specialized roles, hoping that moving salespeople into a less demanding role will solve the problem. Unfortunately, the only thing it accomplishes is to create distraction from the real problem and noise, as more salespeople, in more roles, are failing than ever before.
It is clear that God had expectations and goals, and was intolerant of non-performance, under-performance, and especially non-compliance. If you lead a sales organization, why not follow God’s lead?
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Could Lost Deals Correlate with Sales Success?
- September 20, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force
I love looking for correlations and causation and we use causation to build predictive sales scorecards. Nobody closes 100% of their closable opportunities but with a properly constructed scorecard, you’ll know the opportunities on which to devote your resources, and which opportunities would be best to lose as fast as you can.
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Why You Should Never Use Your Gut to Hire Salespeople
- September 15, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Sales Assessments Compared, Understanding the Sales Force
Your gut is nothing more than your feelings and when you allow feelings to influence your decisions, you make bad decisions.
The same should apply to hiring salespeople except, for some reason, Sales Managers, Sales Leaders and Human Resource professionals believe their gut does tell them when they have a salesperson who is close to perfect for their team.
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Hydrangeas Tell the Story of Underperforming Salespeople
- September 13, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Understanding the Sales Force
You don’t have to stand by, throw your hands in the air, become frustrated and use hope as your strategy. When did hope even become a strategy? You don’t need to terminate these underperforming salespeople and replace them with new salespeople who might not get it done. Take matters into your own hands, get the help you need to actually develop your salespeople.
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Expectations, Revisions, and Excuses on the Sales Team
- September 9, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Bible and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Nothing frustrates a CEO more than when the monthly numbers are not met. The government is doing it too. We saw the goal posts being moved almost daily during the pandemic. The news tells us what to expect for the monthly, quarterly and annual reports on Cost of Living, Inflation, Interest Rates, Illegal Immigration, and Jobs. Then the “actual” numbers are reported, followed by huge revisions to what was reported a few months later.
