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This Simple Strategy Will Sell Your ROI and Value Proposition Every Time
- March 7, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most salespeople can calculate ROI and explain it to their prospects, but many of them find it equally difficult to articulate that same ROI after they have been presented with a price objection. They become defensive, review features and benefits, and make the situation worse for themselves instead of better. We are going to review the case history of a salesperson who had an $85,000 solution that would increase company revenue from $10 million to $20 million. Despite promising a $10 million gain, he was unable to overcome what he heard from his prospect: “That’s too much money!” In this article, we will discuss how it’s done.
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Breaking News – More Salespeople Suck Than Ever Before (and Why)
- February 29, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Salespeople always seem to get a bad rap and obviously that’s bad for business. But it’s always been that way and nobody has made a very big deal about it, so what has changed?
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Sure Fire Way to Know Which Sales Opportunities are the Best Sales Opportunities
- February 24, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I just love it when cool gets cooler and I’m not talking about the winter weather in New England. About a month ago, I wrote this article on Targeting and shared a generic model for scoring opportunities. George Bronten and Henrik Oquist, CEO and COO of Membrain, took note and developed the concept as a new feature for their world-class CRM application, Membrain. You have to see how we integrated this new feature into the Baseline Selling version of Membrain. In the image below, you can see that we added a scoreboard milestone at two stages of the sales process.
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How Wrong are Company Methods to Rank and Compensate Salespeople?
- February 23, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When report cards and grades are available, measuring the academic success of your child or grandchild is a lot easier than it is to measure sales success. School grades go up and we say, “Great effort!” School grades go down and we say, “Oh-oh, something is seriously wrong here!” Academic grades are a reflection of test scores, completed homework and class participation. Sales grades are another story altogether and that is where most companies make terrible, horrible, awful mistakes. Do you think you know what those mistakes are?
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Must Read – This Email Proves How Poorly the Bottom 74% of Salespeople Perform
- February 17, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Ken is one of my longtime readers, a former client, and last week he sent this note expressing his frustrations as a buyer of services. I’ll add my comments and conclusions at the end of his note.
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School of Rock the Musical Demonstrates Selling to Existing Customers and Customer Service
- February 16, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This weekend we had seats to the new Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway show, School of Rock. Our son has watched the original movie around a dozen times and didn’t think there was the slightest possibility that the show would be as good as the movie. Did the show meet expectations? I’ll share that in a moment, but first, let’s discuss the dynamic of the show versus the movie and compare that to an ongoing sales challenge. While salespeople have expectations for meeting outcomes and sales results, prospects have expectations too – for the meetings, salespeople, products, services, prices and terms that a company will provide at various times during your sales cycle. In the case of movie versus show, there is a better analogy to strategic account management and even customer service.
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Choose Which of These Two Assessments are More Predictive of Sales Success
- February 10, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This week, a candidate for a sales position sent along his Predictive Index (PI) assessment so that we could compare it to his sales assessment from Objective Management Group (OMG). Most people have little sense as to how assessments compare to each other – and even more have experience only with personality and behavioral styles assessments. I was able to extract the dashboard from OMG’s 21 page sales-specific assessment, and the graphics and selling summary from the 3-page Predictive Index behavioral styles assessment. You might find the comparison interesting!
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Sales Coaching and the Challenges of Different Types of Salespeople
- February 8, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Recently a reader directed me to a video on the Harvard Business Review site. They rarely have accurate, relevant sales-specific information there, so I clicked over with great anticipation.
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Has the Sales Profile of an A Player Changed Dramatically?
- February 3, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Recently, a number of readers asked me to review two articles which they thought were right up my alley. Apparently they thirst for one of my specialties – poking holes in articles that are just plain wrong about hiring salespeople. It’s not that I enjoy ripping articles apart, it’s just that I don’t have any tolerance for authors who either don’t know what they are talking about, don’t have any science backing them up, or use examples that can’t be replicated across industries, markets and geographies. Shall we dig in?
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Learn How We Discovered They Had the Wrong Salespeople
- February 1, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Would you believe me if I told you that in a recent sales force evaluation, nearly 50% of the 300 inside salespeople were not in the right role? Recently, we evaluated a large inside sales force and I thought it might be interesting to share some of the more unusual findings that were responsible for this sales team’s inability to achieve the revenue goals that the company expected from them.