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How to Hold the Sales Team Accountable Under New Rules of Sales Engagement
- June 17, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you read yesterday’s post, there was a comment from Teicko who asked how you can hold the sales team accountable under these new rules of sales engagement where you must work three times harder, three times longer, be three times more effective and have three times more opportunities in the pipeline to get the same results as you used to.
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Put on Your Helmet – 3 Great Tips for Selling in This Economy
- June 14, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
What a great interview I had with Bill Murray, Founder and CEO of Winning Incorporated, Friday on my Meet the Sales Experts Radio Show! He was awesome.
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Sales Assessment Says He’s Weak but He Made President’s Club
- June 12, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday a well meaning Sales Manager, in defense of his salesperson, asked me how a salesperson who made “Club” could possibly assess so poorly. It’s a great question with a dozen or more possible explanations. Here are some:
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180 and 360 Degree Assessments on the Sales Force
- June 4, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There are not a lot of companies that undertake 180 degree or 360 degree assessments of the sales force and that’s a good thing because there are so many limitations.
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Salespeople and Requests for References
- June 3, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For the first time in months, I was recently asked for references. No problem!
But it got me thinking about who asks for references, why they ask for references and when they ask for references…and what salespeople do when they’re asked for references, and whether those references lead to closed business.
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Sales Cycles and Time – Is it Running Out?
- June 1, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We are always focused on sales cycles. Are they optimized? Are they taking too long? Can they be improved? How many calls should they take? Are we doing things that make the sales cycle take longer than necessary? For example, the sales cycle can be shortened in direct proportion to how high your salespeople call in the company.
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Hire the Best Salespeople on the Planet
- May 28, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Several months ago Objective Management Group began to identify hirable candidates that are ideal – they will ramp-up more quickly than a normal hirable candidate. A normal candidate should ramp up according to this formula I devised many years ago:
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Salespeople Should be More Like Children
- May 28, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Wouldn’t it be nice if all of your salespeople simply made it their number one priority to find the opportunities required to keep their pipeline stuffed with quality opportunities?
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More than Half of All Sales Managers Should Consider….
- May 19, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
After posting this article two weeks ago, showing the percentage of salespeople who are not trainable, who shouldn’t be in sales, and who are elite, it was inevitable that I would be asked to post similar statistics for sales managers.
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Sales Experts Disagree on Right Way to Train Salespeople
- May 15, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I was involved in a nearly week long, on line discussion with about a half dozen other sales experts in the Top Sales Experts Group at LinkedIn that to date has included about 41 volleys. The original question, raised by the UK publisher of modernselling.com, asked whether there was a right way or a wrong way to train salespeople. While there was some agreement on some points, there was much disagreement on many points.