Search Results
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Why Salespeople Won’t Abandon the Early Demo and Presentation
- March 4, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you want your sales force to strive for sales excellence, the bottom line is that your salespeople won’t drive this transition and neither will a sales manager. You have to drive it. You must commit to it and it must be a sustained commitment. It’s not a do-it-yourself project, so you must also be prepared to do it correctly, get help from a results-oriented firm, and lead by example.
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Sales Excellence Studies Propagate Mediocrity
- February 26, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you conduct a Google search for “sales excellence studies”, you’ll find more than 20,000 results. I’m sure that some results point to surveys which were conducted by others, but either way, that’s a lot of studies on sales excellence. If any of those studies were actually ground-breaking, insightful or truly representative of sales excellence, there would probably be fewer than a dozen. But there are not. There are many reasons why these studies are so lame, but let’s name just a few:
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Sleeves Up Sales Coaching – Why Did You Say That?
- February 25, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
An enormous part of developing salespeople these days is helping them to differentiate themselves from your competitors. Effectively applying a consultative sales process helps to accomplish this. Executed correctly, the salesperson has a conversation with a decision maker that is unlike any conversation the competition has had. It uncovers the compelling reasons for spending money, changing vendors, buying a product or service and, as important, buying it from you. That creates urgency, and an incentive for a prospect to self-qualify. The end-result should be a prospect that is willing to spend more to do business with you, and a sales cycle that is not based on winning the price war.
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To Salespeople, Demos and Presentations are Like Snack Food
- February 11, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Prior to learning about healthy eating, I believed a bagel was a healthy alternative to a donut. After I was shown that a carbohydrate converts to sugar in the blood and there wasn’t much difference between bread, bagels or rolls; and donuts, cake or pie, I changed the way that I ate.
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Top 5 Insights From Latest Sales Organization Studies
- February 7, 2013
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Categories: Best Top 10 Lists, Understanding the Sales Force
The folks over at IKO Systems were nice enough to send me a collection of infographics which they call 66 Crazy Sales Figures. I finally had a chance to read through it and found 5 sales figures which, after I combined them, are quite interesting:
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Baseball’s Huge Impact on Sales Performance
- January 22, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Let’s use Algebra to get a better handle on sales methodology and where it fits in the grand scheme of things. Consider the following formula:
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All-Time Top Kurlan Sales Article
- December 20, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Whether you’re using a personality assessment, behavioral styles assessment, psychological assessment, or psychometric (describes all of the above) assessment, it’s the marketing that’s sales-specific, not the findings. Use them at your own risk.
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Sales Incentives, Awards, Lead Follow-Up and Sales Effectiveness
- December 19, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In the case of appointment setters, as in the email above, training them to be more effective with the appointment-setting conversation will pay dividends too. Not only will the appointments be more qualified, there will actually be more, better-qualified appointments!
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Vote the Best Top Article on Sales and Sales Management
- December 17, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This is a pretty exciting time for us. We reviewed 1,000 articles which I’ve posted on this Blog since 2006 in an effort to present you with the Top 15 Sales Articles of the past six years, and later this week, the Top Sales Article of the last six years. It was not quick, easy, fun or obvious. They aren’t necessarily the most viewed and they do not have the most inbound links. But we did pick fifteen of the more serious articles. Some are articles backed by science and some are assessment comparisons. Five are on selling and two are articles where I debunked other published articles. Missing are the articles with analogies, humor and comparisons to children, but other than that, it’s a nice cross-section.
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Top Kurlan Articles Debunking Sales Studies and Articles
- December 11, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Junk Sales Science Debunked, Understanding the Sales Force
I’ve read an awful lot of studies and articles over the last several years and while most of them have merit, some of them are either dead wrong or have drawn incorrect conclusions. Here are the ones which have earned my criticism: