Search Results
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These 6 Keys and New Data Help Your Sales Team Outperform The Rest
- February 16, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
They found that top performers make 54% more switches – the back and forth in conversations – than everyone else and 78% more in their presentations. The presentations made by top sales performers are not monologues!
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The Difference Between Sales Competencies, Sales Capabilities and Sales Outcomes
- February 14, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you watched Super Bowl 57, you observed two teams that simply refused to give up or give in. Sometimes, that’s the feeling I get when I’m writing articles and I have solid data on my side, while dozens of competing authors just won’t stop their constant barrage of articles using junk science, anecdotal evidence, and alternate facts.
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Made Up Sales Statistics and Their Contrast to Real Data
- February 2, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A sales consultant who knows that I geek out on sales data read that 84% of salespeople suck because they don’t enjoy what they do. A huge percentage of salespeople do actually suck but the actual number is closer to 75%. Is it really because they don’t enjoy selling?
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How Closing a Tough Sale is Nearly Identical to Hitting a Home Run
- August 25, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You’re watching a baseball game on television and the announcer says, “And here’s the pitch and there’s a long drive hit deep to left field and it’s deep, it’s up, it’s way back and GONE!!!!! Home Run Dave Kurlan!” OK, the announcer never said the Dave Kurlan part. Not even close. I was a singles hitter. And I never played at a level that had announcers. So there’s that. For entertainment sake, watch this classic 2-minute clip of Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs hitting the magical home run at the end of the movie, The Natural, one of my all-time favorite baseball movies right up there with The Sandlot and Field of Dreams.
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Not The Top 20 Attributes of Successful Salespeople
- August 1, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The article was 100% junk science and to use the word science would be a disservice to the word junk. Below, you’ll find five reasons why this article was so wrong, so bad, so misleading, so pitiful, and just plain stupid:
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Top Sales Videos and Rants From Dave Kurlan
- March 21, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
From time to time I record impromptu unscripted rants as well as some that are more well thought-out videos. From among the collection presented below, most are rants so the rants are much more popular. The most-watched (I have added to the list so there are more than 10 now!) videos are shown below in order of popularity and while I like all of them, I indicated my personal favorites with an asterisk. All but three of the videos are three-minutes or less, one is six-minutes, one is ten-minutes and one is eight-minutes. Topics include:
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The Top 10% of All Salespeople are 4,000% Better at this than the Bottom 10%
- March 3, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I found Dinger with his nose glued to my front bumper where some of the deer’s hair was still attached to my car. Dinger, who loves to bark at deer from the safety of our home, seemed to be saying, “Ohhhh, so THIS is what a deer smells like!”
The exact same thing happened to a salesperson I was training. It wasn’t a deer or a dog, it was about Jim’s sales aha moment.
His team was asked to send me an email with their five biggest lessons from their first six months of training. Among Jim’s top five was this one:
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Has Buying Changed and Has B2B Selling Adapted?
- January 5, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today’s buyers are self-educated and salespeople mistake that knowledge for readiness. Salespeople tend to take the path of least resistance and the knowledge they mistake for readiness lulls them into the quote, proposal and order taking mode. As a result, they don’t follow their company’s sales process or worse, the company’s sales process has been modified to reflect buyers being ready. If the buyers were truly ready at this point they would actually buy but the additional options prolong instead of shorten the sales process.
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Top 10 Sales and Sales Leadership Articles of 2021
- December 7, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There are several criteria for choosing the top articles of the year, including, but not limited to:
Views (Article)
Popularity (likes on LinkedIn and Twitter)
Engagement (comments to the article, via email, and on LinkedIn)
Personal (my favorites)
Value (insights for the community) -
Crappy Salespeople and Lack of Urgency Alignment – The Bob Chronicles Part 4
- April 27, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This is the fourth installment in the Bob Chronicles. Bob is the weak salesperson who represents the bottom 50% of all salespeople. You can read previous installments about Bob below:
The $225,000 Mistake That Most Salespeople Make
Data – The Top Salespeople are 631% More Effective at This Than Weak Salespeople
Good Bob, Bad Bob, The Stockdale Paradox and Sales Success
You’re probably wondering, what did Bob screw up this time? He screwed up urgency. You might be asking how a salesperson could possibly screw up urgency but Bob and the rest of the weak salespeople screw up just about everything else so why not urgency too?