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Cold Reach Outs: Do Email and LinkedIn Work?
- October 6, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most marketing workflows and the messages created for those workflows absolutely suck! As a result, most of the cold messages that come through your email and LinkedIn messages are quickly and deliberately deleted. But there’s hope for something better.
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The Biblical Sales Team Part 1 – Hiring and Firing Salespeople
- September 29, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Given that God used terminations to achieve his goals and eliminate mistakes, there should be no reason that sales leaders can’t better utilize terminations. More than 50% of all salespeople don’t meet annual quotas and haven’t for years. They should be terminating salespeople at scale, but instead, scared sales leaders create specialized roles, hoping that moving salespeople into a less demanding role will solve the problem. Unfortunately, the only thing it accomplishes is to create distraction from the real problem and noise, as more salespeople, in more roles, are failing than ever before.
It is clear that God had expectations and goals, and was intolerant of non-performance, under-performance, and especially non-compliance. If you lead a sales organization, why not follow God’s lead?
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Could Lost Deals Correlate with Sales Success?
- September 20, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I love looking for correlations and causation and we use causation to build predictive sales scorecards. Nobody closes 100% of their closable opportunities but with a properly constructed scorecard, you’ll know the opportunities on which to devote your resources, and which opportunities would be best to lose as fast as you can.
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Hydrangeas Tell the Story of Underperforming Salespeople
- September 13, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You don’t have to stand by, throw your hands in the air, become frustrated and use hope as your strategy. When did hope even become a strategy? You don’t need to terminate these underperforming salespeople and replace them with new salespeople who might not get it done. Take matters into your own hands, get the help you need to actually develop your salespeople.
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Expectations, Revisions, and Excuses on the Sales Team
- September 9, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Nothing frustrates a CEO more than when the monthly numbers are not met. The government is doing it too. We saw the goal posts being moved almost daily during the pandemic. The news tells us what to expect for the monthly, quarterly and annual reports on Cost of Living, Inflation, Interest Rates, Illegal Immigration, and Jobs. Then the “actual” numbers are reported, followed by huge revisions to what was reported a few months later.
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20 Ways Salespeople Waste Time and Lose Money
- August 31, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I was thinking about how salespeople chase their tails and waste time that could be better utilized on actual selling activities. Here are the first twenty time-wasting tail-chasing things that came to mind and they all reflect some degree of lack of commitment, lack of discipline, lack of consistency and excuse making:
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Steam Vent Hack That Salespeople Can Use on Stalled Opportunities
- August 23, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The guide simply lit a cigarette, lowered it slightly into the vent, it reacted with the air and the steam, and significantly increased the output of steam. A super simple hack that instantly causes a performance improvement gets your attention!
Of course, that got me thinking about a simple hack that will significantly improve sales performance and I present one to you in this article.
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Hiring Salespeople – How Deadpool Would Fare as a Sales Candidate
- August 16, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Hiring salespeople doesn’t have to be complicated but most companies get the entire process wrong from expectations, to job description, specs, job posting, vetting, phone interview, first interview, final interview, selection and on-boarding. The companies we help attract more candidates, better quality candidates, conduct fewer interviews, have significantly less turnover, and new salespeople producing out of the gate. We could probably help you too, but you must want the help. That means getting your ego out of the way, embracing a different way to hire salespeople, paying for the help, and being more patient than before. If you are willing to do that, you can be a big winner and build a kick-ass sales team.
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Is Sales Today Nothing More than its Tech Stack?
- August 9, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you are on the sales team in any function, focus on selling and ignore the noise and distractions of anything that isn’t directly helping you develop your skills to book more meetings, improve your ability to reach decision makers, build relationships and trust, take a consultative approach, sell value, qualify and close business.
To everything else simply say “fuck off.”
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Baby Fish and New Salespeople Experience the Same Fate
- August 1, 2024
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If your turnover is less than 10% you have a turnover problem – not enough turnover! If your turnover is between 10-20% you’re good. If it’s greater than 20% it’s worth exploring what is contributing to your high turnover rate and how to fix it. Sometimes it’s because you are hiring the wrong salespeople. Sometimes it’s lack of effective onboarding, lack of effective sales training, lack of coaching, lack of accountability, or lack of leadership.