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The Two Sides of Likable Salespeople
- July 23, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Do sales leaders find certain salespeople to be more likable? Do prospects and customers find certain salespeople to be more likable? Are likable and integrity intertwined? Can you have likable salespeople who lack integrity?
Some more questions…
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Top 10 Reasons Why Inbound Cannot Replace Sales
- August 15, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Well, it’s really happened now.
I was following a discussion in the Hubspot VAR Group on LinkedIn, where the question posed to the group was whether or not the first sales hire should be a sales or a marketing person.
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Key to Significantly Improve Sales Training Results
- May 28, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The best players, getting the advanced instruction on the travel teams, improve the most. Those same kids, on their regular season team, learn almost nothing new and aren’t challenged or pushed. Practice, and sometimes even the games, can be so boring for them that they don’t play their very best.
Translation from Baseball to Selling
If we translate all of that baseball to selling, the only two things that change are the activity and the age of the people being coached and trained.
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The Real Impact of Coaching Your Salespeople, Sales Managers
- April 1, 2014
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I’m in the middle of another page-turner, this one called The Man Who Killed Kennedy – The Case Against LBJ. It’s difficult to put a positive spin on this amazing, insightful book, about one of the biggest assholes the USA has ever known, but I can take two unintentional sales-related lessons from the book:
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Top 20 Reasons Why Sales Managers Suck at Coaching
- April 4, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
So why aren’t more sales managers effective at coaching salespeople? Here are my top 19 reasons and I left #20 open so that you could add your two-cents worth.
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Why Do So Many Salespeople Fail to Make Quota?
- April 26, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The statistics are staggering. In some sectors, fewer than 25% of all salespeople will make quota. Even best-in-class companies are lucky when fewer than 80% of their salespeople make quota. Are you OK with it when your own salespeople fail to make quota? There are a number of possible reasons for this widespread mediocrity and failure and, depending on the company, some or all of them may apply.
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What It Really Means When CRM Isn’t a Sales Force Priority
- February 15, 2012
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s rare when a company isn’t using something for CRM, even if it’s an old version of ACT. In most companies, it’s not whether they are using CRM, it’s which CRM they have chosen to use and whether the CRM has actually been adopted. The CRM application of choice is completely useless to management unless the entire sales force is using it as intended.
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The Search for Perfection – How it Can Ruin Your Sales Efforts
- September 15, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You work hard, diligently and creatively to develop something and it comes out, well, almost perfect.
But as I mentioned earlier, there is a dark side to perfection and I’ll share the gory details with you here.
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Jiffy Lube Magic, Sales Adaptability and Plagiarism
- June 4, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Perhaps you’ve noticed that while driving past a Jiffy Lube during (slow times for them) your commute there may be a mechanic out front, holding a sign, offering a discount, hoping you’ll pull in. I don’t know about you, but I am not particularly moved by a guy in a jump suit waving for me to stop. But it made me wonder, does this work?
