cold calling
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What Salespeople Can Learn from Harry Potter
- January 6, 2026
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Kick off 2026 with a killer January by mastering the first 10 seconds of every cold call. Inspired by the jaw-dropping magic of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway, Dave Kurlan reveals why most salespeople sound boring, stiff, or scripted — and how to deliver a “magical” opener that grabs prospects instantly and books more meetings.
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My Key to Building a Strong, Sustainable, Sales Pipeline
- April 16, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Building a strong, sustainable pipeline requires not only commitment and discipline from salespeople, it also requires commitment and discipline from their sales leaders who cannot allow them to give up, give in, or take short cuts. While excellence involves advanced sales training skills, extended practice sessions and coaching, the desire to improve is the most important element.
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Shania Twain’s Lesson for Sales Leaders Who Want to Hire Stronger Salespeople
- April 14, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Instead of seeking industry experience, a degree, and related characteristics, sales leaders must vet for the ability to succeed at selling to your specific audience, at your price point, and against your competition. That one difference takes the entire sourcing, screening, vetting, interviewing, selecting, hiring, and on-boarding process and turns it upside down. Different tools. Different process. Different sourcing. Different questions. Different answers. Different results.
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Getting Salespeople to Prospect When They Aren’t Prospecting
- November 15, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While some growth can be expected to come from effective account management, the kind of growth desired by most companies comes from consistently finding and closing new accounts. While companies love their inbound lead-generation programs, and those programs do generate leads, the quality of the leads, and the quality of the meetings booked by those young and inexperienced top-of-funnel kids, leaves much to be desired.
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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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My Latest on Using Email to Book New Meetings
- November 29, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Salespeople have been spoiled by inbound leads, outbound emails, and BDRs generating leads for them. As a result, those in sales for fewer than ten years never learned how and suck at cold calling. Those who used to cold call but have since stopped, forgot how to and also suck at cold calling.
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4 Types of Sales Positions That Can Never Be Replaced by AI
- February 22, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We’re seeing ChatGPT’s ability to create human-like articles, essays, poems, notes and messages.
I just asked ChatGPT to write a short poem on the death of selling. Here’s what it generated.
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Why I Believe We Should Blow up the Business Development Rep (BDR) Role in Sales
- March 29, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For decades it was normal practice for Copy Machine, Office Supply, Cell Phones, Life Insurance and Residential Real Estate companies to recruit and train (a little classroom) rookie salespeople and then have them spend years making Cold Calls. Industries like those continue to suffer from the highest voluntary turnover rates you can imagine and the practice is not entirely different from what tech companies are doing with the BDR Role.
But why? Whose brilliant idea was this?
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Phone Prospecting – the Key to Scheduling Meetings
- May 23, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today, a salesperson left a voicemail message and he didn’t sound bad; but his strategy and script were awful. Listen to the message below and try to identify what was wrong. Then watch the video below to hear me talk getting your prospects to pay attention and engage with you on the phone.
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Call Reluctance is Just as Popular as Ever!
- March 7, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While some are quick to blame the low (as bad as) 15:1 dial to conversation ratio, that number is driven in part by salespeople who don’t try hard enough to get their prospects to the phone.