asking questions
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MLB’s Replay Center Offers Lessons for the Sales Call Debrief
- May 4, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Think an MLB Replay Center and a sales call debrief have nothing in common? Think again. Both dissect critical moments with precision, from context to execution, to get the call right. Discover how a sales manager’s review mirrors baseball’s high-stakes analysis—and why precision is the key to winning in both games.
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10 Cringy Things Salespeople Do and 7 Reasons Why They Do It
- March 13, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Salespeople are responsible for a lot of cringy selling. In this article I share what I believe are the ten things salespeople do to elicit cringy reactions from their prospects and the top seven reasons for why half of all salespeople cause the cringe.
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6 Benefits From Incorporating C2MPE in Your Selling Efforts
- February 10, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You could say that the Philadelphia Eagles showed up for Super Bowl LIX with tremendous urgency to win. You could also say that the Kanas City Chiefs made it clear that they lacked that same urgency.
While the single most important thing for salespeople to achieve in a discovery call is urgency, you can’t tell a prospect that they have urgency, you can’t manufacture urgency, and you can’t fake urgency.
Urgency arises from a combination of the following five factors which together, I call C2MPE:
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How to Prepare for the Big Sales Presentation
- June 24, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The goal of the big presentation, as with the debate, is to differentiate, but that requires knowing your competition’s strengths and weaknesses and being able to point out those where you are superior. Assuming that your price will be higher, you must represent its value and it must be that value that stands out above and beyond everything else. How can you be the value?
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Winning and Retaining Business When There is Competition
- April 30, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We were away for most of April, watching our son play his senior year of college baseball. When we left Massachusetts, the calendar said early April, the grass and gardens were still dormant and the weather felt like mid-January with some games played in 25-degree wind chills!
When we returned home three weeks later, we looked outside and saw life! Flowers were in bloom, the Bradford Pears and Crab Apple trees had blossoms, and the green grass had already been mowed a couple of times. Although we weren’t there, nature did its thing without us.
Pivot to sales.
It doesn’t matter whether salespeople are in account management or account executive roles. The sales equivalent of nature at work occurs at both target accounts and existing accounts. When salespeople aren’t physically present or on the phone with decision makers at the account, it is likely that one of their competitors is physically present or on the phone competing for the business or trying to take their business away. Just because a salesperson doesn’t see or hear about it, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
What can you do?
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My Most Popular Sales Article of the Last Ten Years
- December 13, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Suppose your salespeople hear one prospect say, “This has been a very interesting and productive conversation and we might have some interest in this.” And imagine another prospect at the same meeting says, “We’ll get back to you next month and let you know what kind of progress we’ve made.” And still a third might say, “In the meantime, please send us a proposal with references and a timeline.”
There are three important lessons that arise from this:
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New Movie Has 3 Great Lessons for Salespeople and Sales Managers
- January 18, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Among all the product shortages we have experienced in the past ten months, there has been no shortage of crappy movies. It’s almost like the movie studios decided to release all the movies filmed in the past several years that weren’t ready for prime time and hope that people would stream them at home during the pandemic because we had watched everything else.
One exception to the crappiness of 2020 movies is The Trial of the Chicago 7. This article is not a review of the movie but it was a terrific film and worth the time to watch it. As good as this movie is, it comes with a bonus because it also provides three exceptional lessons for salespeople and sales managers. Let’s take a look!
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FDR and Sir Isaac Newton on Why Salespeople Fail
- August 25, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Unlike the made up fears that prevent salespeople from asking tough questions, qualifying more thoroughly, or picking up the phone and making a cold call, the fear of burning alive in a hotel fire seemed like a pretty justifiable one.
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Change in Approach Leads to 304% Increase in Sales Effectiveness
- September 9, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You’re famished and someone suggests that you go on a 2-day fast!
You’re late, it’s a two-hour ride by car to your destination and someone suggests that you walk!
You’re exhausted and ready for a nap and someone suggests you should clean out your basement!
You’ve decided to eat better and lay-off carbs, and someone suggests ordering pizza!
These are all crazy opposites of what you were focused on and they cause you to ask, “whaaat?”
So now you’ll understand how I responded when, during a two-day training program, I was asked about messaging for a talk track.
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Are Salespeople Still Using the Hard Sell?
- March 27, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When you hear a phrase like the hard sell, do you instantly think of car salespeople? Insurance? Replacement windows? No offense intended to those of you in one of those three industries!
While someone’s reference to a hard sell may differ, the perception of the hard sell is fairly universal. After prospects state an objection, say they’re not interested, or tell the salesperson, “No,” prospects tend to raise their resistance. Most salespeople have been trained to handle these objections and put-offs and therein lies the problem. There are proper and effective ways to handle these, and there are improper and ineffective ways to handle these. When you use the wrong approach it will appear to the prospect as if you are using the hard sell and their resistance will go up even further.
Most salespeople think that the hard sell consists of arm-wrestling, hammering or pressuring their prospect. While all three of those approaches are variations of the hard sell, most salespeople overcompensate so much that they wouldn’t be caught dead using them. Instead, salespeople are guilty of the hard sell when they aren’t aware of it. All it takes to be perceived of using the hard sell is to attempt any of the following ten things in response to a prospect’s increased resistance:
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