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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.
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Why This is Still a Great Selling Sales Book After 10 Years
- January 28, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Pete Caputa, VP at Hubspot, wrote a really great article about the 3 sales books that are must-reads for salespeople, why, and Baseline Selling was one of the three.
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Sales Performance – Stop Worrying About the Words You Say
- January 25, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When coaching, most sales managers change the words their salespeople use. “That’s not how I would say it – try this instead!” While there are a couple of key moments in the sales process where the words do actually matter, for 98% of the sales process, it’s about listening and asking appropriate questions, following the process, achieving key milestones, following the company’s general strategy and using appropriate sales tactics. It’s almost never about the actual words. For example, last week I coached a salesperson who was using all of the words the other salespeople on the team were instructed to use – but with vastly different results. I think you’ll find the coaching interesting.
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How Targeting Improves Win Rates and Shortens Sales Cycles
- January 19, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In sales, when we talk about targets, most people immediately think about revenue and profit targets, and sometimes product units and/or shipment targets. However, today we will discuss the importance of having targets around your opportunities. Please take a moment to review the image below:
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Sales Selection Experiment – Part 2 – It’s Back!
- January 13, 2016
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When our son was just beginning to speak and we did something that he really enjoyed, he would say, “Again! Again!”
Two years ago, I wrote about a sales selection experiment with a group of college kids and the results were so much fun to read that when they repeated the exercise this year, my first reaction was, “Again!” I think you’re going to really enjoy the conclusions from this year’s class!