• What CEO’s and Sales Leaders Care About the Most – Are They Trends for 2017?

    • December 16, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I reviewed the 88 articles I wrote in 2016 (nearly 1,600 articles on the Blog) and was surprised to discover what I wrote about the most.  It wasn’t about sales force evaluations, sales candidate assessments or attacks on the Harvard Business Review.  It wasn’t about sales recruiting and selection, sales pipeline or Baseline Selling.  It wasn’t any of things I expected to write about most often.   Because my topics are driven by the conversations I have with clients and prospective clients, my articles are a reflection of what CEO’s and Sales Leaders care about.  I really think you’ll be surprised to find out what they cared most about this year.

    read more

  • Is Excuse Making Actually the Biggest Obstacle to Increasing Sales?

    • December 14, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’ve talked a lot about excuse making and the powerful difference between using your index finger, which points outward, versus your thumb, which points inward.  Today, Brandon Steiner wrote a great little article about taking responsibility.

    read more

  • Holiday Sales Treat – A Mashup of Two Classic Songs

    • December 6, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This past weekend I read that the lyrics to the popular Christmas song, “Baby it’s Cold Outside” were rewritten to emphasize consent.  And the weekend before I saw the news that Brady Bunch Mom, Florence Henderson, had passed away.  That immediately caused the Brady Bunch theme song to come to mind but my brain tends to combine things. In 2005, when I combined sales and baseball,  it became Baseline Selling, which when I looked as I was writing this, was still ranked #9 in the sales category on Amazon.com.  So my brain went and combined the Brady Bunch Theme song with a lyric change and came up with this diddy on OMG.

    read more

  • Companies Rush to Get This One Thing in Place for their Sales Teams Before January

    • December 1, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Over the past few months, the majority of the calls and emails coming in have been to get help building predictive scorecards.  Yesterday alone I spoke with the CEO’s from 3 companies about building and slotting scorecards into their existing sales processes.

    Why the sudden rage over scorecards?  

    read more

  • Applicant Tracking and Sales Candidate Assessments Fit Like Ducks Take to Water

    • November 21, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Back to the Applicant Tracking analysis.  My first takeaway is that it validated what I knew only anecdotally –
    that just about every mid-market and large company are using cloud-based applicant tracking systems and smaller companies are quickly moving in that direction too.  It makes sense. If companies are using cloud-based job sites to source candidates, then it only makes sense that they would be integrating applicant tracking as well.

    My second takeaway is that with all of these companies sourcing from the cloud and tracking from the cloud, why aren’t more of them using the best sales candidate assessment in the cloud?  I have 4 possible answers to that question:

    read more

  • Why Do You Think That Harvard Business Review Does This When it Comes to Sales?

    • November 18, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The most recent example of Harvard Business Review and sales stupidity came earlier this month when they ran an article on social selling being the solution to prevent salespeople from becoming obsolete.  I wrote this article on LinkedIn bring it to light and differentiate fact from fiction.

    read more

  • Top 3 Reasons Why Sales Training Doesn’t Change Your Salespeople

    • November 17, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I get asked this question a lot: “We’ve tried sales training before and it didn’t really change anything. Why didn’t it work?”

    read more

  • Have the Promises of Inbound Sales Come to Fruition?

    • November 14, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Last week, I spoke at Inbound, where 19,000 people attended this sold-out event in Boston.  Ironically, I spoke to a crowd that wanted to learn how to be more effective at engaging prospects by phone and converting those conversations to meetings.  Why is it ironic?  Well, the promise of the Inbound movement is that cold calling is dead. Salespeople will reap the benefits of inbound leads from prospects who had already expressed interest.  Has that happened?

    read more

  • How to Change a Crappy Sales Compensation Plan to a Better One

    • November 3, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    First, this is simply an example – one example – and not the only way to create a sales compensation plan.  However, this example will illustrate the most important component to be changed.

    read more