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Anatomy of the Million Dollar Producer
- May 3, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Do you have salespeople that aren’t profitable, don’t contribute enough to overhead, won’t change what they’re doing and simply aren’t benefiting the company?
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How Do Companies Retain Their Underperforming Salespeople?
- April 30, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I explain the difference between lousy salespeople and good salespeople in terms of line items and investments in this article.
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One Hidden Gem in 10 Sales Management Challenges
- April 28, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You have a sales force and some of your salespeople are difficult to manage. There are varying reasons for the challenges. They could include, but aren’t limited to these 10:
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Lousy Salespeople and Great Salespeople – Line Item or Investment?
- April 26, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Lousy salespeople are a line item but great salespeople are an investment. It’s actually much worse than that. The line item on your lousy salespeople is only a fraction of what they really cost. Don’t believe me? Then answer these three questions:
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Anatomy of the Worst Sales Call Ever
- April 23, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s easier to talk about some of the things he failed to do since he didn’t do anything correctly. If we were to perform an analysis working backwards from the end of his (can’t really call what he did a) sales process:
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Football’s Pitch Count and its Connection to Sales Management
- April 22, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Herm Edwards, currently of ESPN and formerly the Head Coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, was interviewed on WEEI, Boston’s Sports Talk Radio station today. He said a couple of things that were quite compelling:
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Who Do You Call When Your Sales Forecast is Busted?
- April 20, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When your short-term sales forecast indicates that you’ll come up short this period (month), what do you direct your salespeople to do in order to fill the gap?
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When the Sales Goals Change but the Behavior and Results Don’t
- April 19, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Suppose that you need your salespeople to find significantly more new business. Perhaps you’ve wanted this for a while but it’s only recently that you communicated this to your salespeople. You’ve changed the goal but after a month your salespeople’s behavior and results haven’t changed at all.
Let’s compare this to weight loss.
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Call Reluctance in Salespeople – Causes, Factors, and Predictors
- April 15, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Objective Management Group (OMG) has always been able to accurately (to 95%) predict whether a salesperson would succeed and provide conditions for employment. Over the years, we’ve been able to fine tune our accuracy even more as we incorporated some additional non-sales factors that made strong salespeople poor candidates for a particular role or company. Three of the most important, recent factors were:
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Customer Service Neutralizes Efforts of Your Sales Force
- April 14, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I am more convinced every day that the most overlooked and under-rated sales function in most companies is their customer service department.
This extends beyond toll-free phone numbers and includes the people you meet when you walk into a company’s retail locations too.
When was the last time you ended a conversation with customer service feeling thrilled that you were a customer of companies like Dell, Verizon, USAirways, Charter or Microsoft? Would that change if I typed Apple instead of Dell?