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The Second Most Important Sales Lesson of My Life
- September 8, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Earlier this week I posted an article that told the story of the biggest sales lesson of my life. I received so many emails about that article because it seemed to really resonate with my readers. Yet, as much as it resonated, there was one question that several of them asked in their emails. They wanted to know why we were in that tenement building in the first place. And the answer to that question leads me to the second most important sales lesson of my life.
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Remembering The Most Powerful Sales Lesson of My Life
- September 6, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Which one thing helps almost every salesperson succeed, even when they have other challenges?
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Are Millennials Who Enter Sales Better or Worse Than the Rest of the Sales Population?
- August 31, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Millennials are more independent, more spoiled, have a shorter attention span, tend to be more into their technology than into people, don’t like working traditional hours, and don’t enjoy working in traditional ways. That said, would you expect them to be better or worse suited for selling than the generations who came before them?
I took to the data to see what story it might tell. I found data on more than 43,000 millennials in sales and here is what I learned. This information should be very helpful for hiring new salespeople and developing them as well.
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Dissecting the #1 Sales Best Practice
- August 26, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
One company is attempting to create a compilation of best sales practices by sending out a weekly survey to sales leaders and asking them to choose from multiple choice questions what they most often do and teach. The topic changes each week. This is silly because (1) it just isn’t that simple, (2) it’s different for each selling role, each vertical, the decision makers they call on, their price points, the length of their sales cycle, and their respective competition, just to name a few. In addition, when you ask multiple choice questions like this, the answers will be so varied that there won’t be even a few, never mind a single best practice. Here is an example of what they asked this week:
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Top 10 Reasons Why Sales Don’t Grow
- August 24, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Despite knowing that things don’t fix themselves, thousands of executives believe that sales problems will resolve themselves, change, and improve. Why?
That’s the key question. Because when you don’t know exactly what’s wrong, it’s much easier to remain in denial.
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HBR or OMG – Whose Criteria Really Differentiate the Top and Bottom 10% of Salespeople?
- August 22, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In their June 20, 2016 article, A Portrait of the Overperforming Salesperson, HBR identified several traits, attitudes and actions that they claim differentiate the top from bottom performers. I’ll summarize it for you below and then explain why I believe it is junk. The findings include:
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The Craziest, Most Unusual Sales Selection Criteria and What Really Works
- August 9, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It was just last month that I wrote this hugely popular article about the tech buyer who hated salespeople. In the first paragraph I mentioned that I had a crazy case of poison ivy. At about the one-week point, I started searching Google to find anything that might help ease the itching and discomfort. As you might guess, the remedies I found included some very crazy things that common sense would tell you to stay away from. Well, in the 31 years I’ve been in the sales consulting business, I have heard some very crazy sales selection criteria too. When salespeople are hired but don’t work out, executives and in some cases, entire industries, stick their head in the sand and call it normal or acceptable. Life insurance, where turnover can run as high as 90%, is a perfect example of this. Insurance industry executives say that it’s perfectly normal. However, outside of the insurance industry, most executives will try just about any remedy to stop the discomfort. Here are some of the craziest I’ve seen.
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The 4 Top Sales Leadership Articles to Boost Sales Today
- August 5, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There have been at least 2 lists published of the sales books you should read on the beach this summer so we are not going there! But summer is for sun and fun and some of the best things in life happen during the summer. As a result, we miss some of the best work-related things because we aren’t working as many hours, may be in catch-up mode and not have the time to get to everything we would get to during cooler months. With that in mind, some of the best articles you haven’t read were published this summer!
I’m going to share four of them right here, tell you why the article will help today, and you can decide whether or not to read it.
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Do You Know if Your Sales Organization is Digital or Analog?
- August 4, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
During our very first conversation with a CEO, the talking path is determined by whether their company is analog or digital.
Digital companies are typically on the cutting edge in their thinking and actions, their CEO’s read content like this, are active on LinkedIn and Twitter, they are aware that selling has changed dramatically, they already have inside sales teams, playbooks, demo decks, sales enablement, online tools beyond CRM and in true digital fashion, they live by their KPI’s which count the elements of their work flow.
Analog companies are old school. Analog salespeople still pound the phones to find opportunities, and visit their prospects to close sales. Their CEO’s may have a LinkedIn account, but it probably isn’t used much, they don’t tweet, read online content like this, and most importantly, have little clue about how dramatically selling has changed in the past 5 years. They may not be aware of the migration to inside sales, typically make little use of selling tools, don’t know what a sales playbook is, and in true analog fashion, measure work product, not flow.
The difference between work flow in a digital company versus work product in the analog company is dramatic too.
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What Sales Managers Do That Make Them So Ineffective
- July 26, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Earlier this week I wrote an article on why so many sales managers are so bad. In today’s article, I’ll share what makes them so ineffective. The easiest way to explain this is to start with a baseball analogy.