objective management group

  • Your Last Chance to Make a Good First Impression

    • June 14, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Most salespeople don’t take first impressions seriously enough. If they did, their first impressions would be much more favorable.

    I can still remember my first (unintentional) lesson about first impressions.  My family was gathered at my grandfather’s house to watch the debut of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show.  It was February 9, 1964 and at 8 years old, I was one of seventy-three million people watching the show that night.  I was as excited about this show as I would be later that same year when I attended my first Red Sox baseball game at Fenway Park.  That is pretty excited! 

    Sitting on the carpet, I was completely focused on seeing and hearing The Beatles play five of their hit songs, but my mother was doing color commentary from the plastic covered sofa behind me.

    She said, “He’s cleaner than the other 3”, referring to Paul McCartney, who had straighter teeth, and a face more suitable for the mop top hair style shared by the four of them.

    There it was, my first lesson in judging people by how they looked, and more specifically, what “clean” did and did not look like.

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  • Do the Best Sales Managers Have the Best Salespeople?

    • August 27, 2018
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    We all see the effects that strong leaders have when they surround themselves with either strong, mediocre or weak people.  What happens when strong leaders inherit a mixed team?  What happens when they hire a mixed team?  What happens when we ask the same questions about weak leaders?

    I dug into a subset of data from Objective Management Group’s (OMG) evaluations of the salespeople who report to more than 15,000 sales managers to determine whether the best sales managers actually have the best salespeople.  I was surprised and disappointed by what I found.  Check this out!

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  • Closing and Negotiating Challenges – Symptoms of Another Selling Problem

    • April 25, 2017
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    One of OMG’s sales candidate assessment clients in Europe purchased two goldfish. In keeping with their tradition, the client named the two fish, Recommended and Not Recommended.  Surprisingly, recruiting salespeople was not one of the topics addressed in the Richardson 2017 Selling Challenges Study.  Meghan Steiner, from Richardson, was nice enough to send me a copy of the results.  There were a number of interesting findings and of course I had some insights from the report.

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  • The Benefits of Completely Bashing Your Competition

    • October 26, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I’m referring to the circus known as the 2016 Presidential Election. It has moved from ugly to downright terrifying as we watch two presidential candidates slinging the most horrible attacks on each other.  And the worst part is that most of those attacks are well deserved.  But there is an important selling lesson we can take from all of this.  Does bashing your competition ever work?

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  • Are Millennials Who Enter Sales Better or Worse Than the Rest of the Sales Population?

    • August 31, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Millennials are more independent, more spoiled, have a shorter attention span, tend to be more into their technology than into people, don’t like working traditional hours, and don’t enjoy working in traditional ways.  That said, would you expect them to be better or worse suited for selling than the generations who came before them?

    I took to the data to see what story it might tell. I found data on more than 43,000 millennials in sales and here is what I learned.  This information should be very helpful for hiring new salespeople and developing them as well.

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  • HBR or OMG – Whose Criteria Really Differentiate the Top and Bottom 10% of Salespeople?

    • August 22, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In their June 20, 2016 article, A Portrait of the Overperforming Salesperson, HBR identified several traits, attitudes and actions that they claim differentiate the top from bottom performers.  I’ll summarize it for you below and then explain why I believe it is junk.  The findings include:

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  • Those Who Follow Sales Best Practices Don’t Necessarily Become Top Performers

    • June 24, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You’ll regularly find me writing about the science – the data – that differentiates top sales performers from the bottom.  But today, I’ll move into the world from which everyone else in this space operates – anecdotal evidence and opinions. 

    I will cite two sources for this article:

    The 130 sales consulting firms that partner with me at Objective Management Group (OMG) and provide our award-winning sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments;
    The tens of thousands of salespeople, sales managers and sales leaders that I have personally trained.

    In both groups of people I have noticed a few things that are common to the tops and not so much the bottoms and I’m certain that if you paid attention, you would recognize some of the same patterns in your organization.

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  • What Should You Do When You or Your Company is Disliked in Sales?

    • April 11, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I know. Everyone loves you. You are just so likable that it’s inconceivable that you could be disliked. As usual, I see things a bit differently and I’ll prove that there is someone that not only dislikes you, but might even hate you. For example, my company, Objective Management Group (OMG), is universally hated by an entire vertical! I’ll share that with you, but first I must ask you a question.

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  • Why Uncovering Pain Doesn’t Close the Sale with a CEO and the 3 Conditions You Do Need

    • April 4, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I want to share 5 out of more than 100 important insights that they took away which apply equally to you too.

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  • Breaking News – More Salespeople Suck Than Ever Before (and Why)

    • February 29, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Salespeople always seem to get a bad rap and obviously that’s bad for business. But it’s always been that way and nobody has made a very big deal about it, so what has changed?

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