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What is the Best Sales Process for Increasing Sales?
- July 14, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Companies have terrific results when they implement Baseline Selling, and last week a well-known expert asked, “What is the big secret that makes Baseline Selling so powerful?” He thought it would make for a great article discussion, so let’s attempt to answer that question by starting with a few questions of my own.
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The 21 New Sales Core Competencies for Modern Selling
- July 10, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Can you name 10 Core Competencies of a great salesperson? Let’s see, there’s prospecting, qualifying and closing, and then there’s….wow, this is difficult!
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My Top 21 Keys to Help Your Sales Force Dominate Today
- July 8, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Do you have salespeople who are busy, but struggling to succeed? Do you have salespeople who are putting in long hours, but don’t generate enough business in relation to the time invested? Do you have salespeople who find enough opportunities, but struggle to get them closed? In my experience, there isn’t a correlation between busy and successful. Oh sure, successful salespeople may be busy and busy salespeople might be successful, but one being true does not necessarily mean that the other is true as well.
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Leads are Making Salespeople Lazier Than Old Golden Retrievers
- July 7, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We all know that the introduction beats the crap out of the lead follow-up 95 times out of 100. If that’s the case, why are so many salespeople spending all of their time attempting to generate and follow-up on the leads that produce results 5 times out of 100?
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One Thing Missing from The New Way of Selling – Part 2
- July 2, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Selling is still selling and while a lot has changed in the last 10 years, a lot of it hasn’t. I’m a social seller. Social sellers get found, find prospects and connect using a myriad of social selling tools. But once a meeting has been scheduled, the social must be dropped in favor of the selling. A prospect should only be aware of a terrific conversation, but process and methodology must be hidden backstage.
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The One Sales Question I’ve Been Wrong About for Years
- July 1, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I must be a moron. Stupid. Dumb. Blind. Certainly, I couldn’t have been paying attention or it wouldn’t have taken me 28 years to figure this one out!
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Top 10 Reasons Why Your Great New Salesperson Might Fail
- June 30, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When a great salesperson is recommended by Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Candidate Assessment, and this star has a great track record, and great references, should we expect this person to succeed?
Most executives do.
But even though salespeople will tell you that “If you can sell, you can sell anything”, that statement is only true some of the time. Here are some examples of salespeople who are successful in one environment, but usually fail in another:
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United Airlines Uses Customer Service This Way to Impact Sales
- June 26, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Customer service has a very important selling role. Their job is to solve a customer’s problem and do it in such a way that the customer forgets about the problem they had and remembers only how well and painlessly their problem was solved and how nicely they were treated in the process. When companies screw this up, customer service has succeeded in UNSELLING a customer. It isn’t rocket science, but it does reflect poorly on recruiting, selection, management, onboarding and training.
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This is the One Thing Missing from the New Way of Selling
- June 20, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Prospects aren’t ready to buy at this point in their process, they’re just getting finished with looking at their options! Salespeople don’t have qualified or closable opportunities at this point, but they’re acting as if they did, creating and sending unqualified proposals, making assumptions, and hoping for the best.
What’s Missing?
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Fine Tune Your Sales Force as You Optimize Your Computer
- June 18, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I deleted about 10,000 sent items from Outlook, repaired the machine’s permissions, restarted the laptop, and it was performing to expectations again. I was excited about what I had accomplished in such a short time!
That process isn’t very different from what executives must do with an underperforming sales force.