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11 Ways You Can Quickly Increase Sales, Revenue and Profit
- July 13, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Verne Harnish is the President of Gazelles – the coaching organization that helps fast growth companies. In addition to his best-selling books, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and his latest, Scaling Up, he writes the Weekly Insights, which I always read from top to bottom. In his June 30 insights, Verne included a quote from Greg Brenneman, author of Right Away and All at Once – 5 Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life. Verne really liked Greg’s emphasis on how to drive sales. Greg says, “Empirical evidence shows that you get at least four times the market value for a dollar of profit that comes from revenue growth versus a dollar of profit that comes from cost reduction.”
Isn’t that a great quote? But it’s more than a quote. It’s a blueprint! Let’s discuss some of the ways that you can achieve the desired revenue growth.
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Tech Buyer Explains Why He Has No Use for Salespeople – Must Read
- July 11, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I managed to develop a case of poison ivy that is so bad it is making my blood boil. Earlier this year I wrote an article explaining why more salespeople suck than ever before. (You’ll need to read that article for the rest of this article to make any sense.) Last week, a reader provided a comment that also made my blood boil and I wrote a response to it. I think you’ll get as riled up over his comment as I did and I hope you’ll love my response, but first, read that article, return here and read his comment which I have included below, and then continue reading for my reply. You won’t be sorry!
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Sales Process – It’s All about the Shoes, Silly
- June 28, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve written dozens of articles on Sales Process an you can read many of them right here. If you pay attention, you can even see how my thinking has changed over the last 10 years. While I have never wavered on the importance of sales process, I have modified my thinking on why it’s so important, what it must consist of, how it should work, and how it should be integrated into CRM.
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Which Thoughts Affect How Successful You Will be in Sales?
- June 27, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I finished reading Game 7 – Ron Darling’s book on the final game of the 1986 World Series, and I’m half way through Shoe Dog – Nike creator Phil Knight’s memoir. They’re similar books because each devotes so much ink and analysis as to how their own thinking and beliefs – both positive and negative – shaped their actions and outcomes. Read them and imagine sales instead of baseball and entrepreneurship, and both books will help shape the ideal thought process to support selling! I highly recommend both books. I wrote a lot about beliefs in selling in both Mindless Selling and my best-seller, Baseline Selling. As a matter of fact, when Objective Management Group (OMG) measures this, only 45% of the sales population have 80% or more of the possible supportive sales beliefs and only 6% (elite territory) have better than 87% of the possible supportive sales beliefs!
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Those Who Follow Sales Best Practices Don’t Necessarily Become Top Performers
- June 24, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You’ll regularly find me writing about the science – the data – that differentiates top sales performers from the bottom. But today, I’ll move into the world from which everyone else in this space operates – anecdotal evidence and opinions.
I will cite two sources for this article:
The 130 sales consulting firms that partner with me at Objective Management Group (OMG) and provide our award-winning sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments;
The tens of thousands of salespeople, sales managers and sales leaders that I have personally trained.In both groups of people I have noticed a few things that are common to the tops and not so much the bottoms and I’m certain that if you paid attention, you would recognize some of the same patterns in your organization.
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What Percentage of New Salespeople Reach Decision Makers?
- June 20, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I reviewed a new set of around 8,500 rows of data today. I wanted to know what percentage of salespeople were able to get past gatekeepers, including voice mail systems, and reach decision makers. This was very interesting!
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Surprising New Data on Salespeople Busts the Myths about Relationship Selling and Social Selling
- June 16, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I had a theory about salespeople, but didn’t have the data to prove it out. I believed that social selling was a godsend to those in sales who were not great at relationship building – that by utilizing applications like LinkedIn and Twitter, they could reach out to new people, but with the benefit of hiding behind the glass screen. Do you think I was right? Or wrong?
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A CEO’s Guide to the Differences in Sales Leadership Roles
- June 15, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I was reviewing a sales leadership evaluation with my client, a CEO, who was a bit confused over how this was different from a sales management evaluation. He wondered, “Aren’t sales managers and sales leaders the same?”
He has a sales force that was typical of a mid-size business with a Sales VP (the sales leader), 2 sales managers, and about 15 salespeople between them. In my experience, there is a boatload of confusion over the differences between Sales Managers, Sales Directors, Sales VP’s, Regional Sales Managers, National Sales Managers, Senior Sales VP’s, Worldwide Sales VP’s, Sales Operations VP’s, Sales Enablement VP’s and Chief Revenue Officers.
Let’s attempt to explain some of the important differences between Sales Managers and the other Sales Leadership roles.
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The One Sales Data Point That Varies Wildly
- June 13, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In my last article, we discussed big data and big lies in the sales assessment space and touched on OMG’s 230,000,000 data points. Most of the data points are very consistent across cultures and continents, but there is one that varies wildly depending on the role, the country, and the culture.
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Big Data and Big Lies Have Arrived in the Sales Training and Assessment Space
- June 3, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday I received an email that you might have received too. It was a promotion from Top Sales World (TSW) to download a “Free Big Data-Driven Sales Training Report for Your Industry.” TSW was simply the messenger in this case, with the provider being The Sales Board. Like many of you, I clicked through and saw that their report was based on their assessments. And this is where it got really interesting for me! Their website read an awful lot like OMG’s – only the numbers were very different…