objective management group

  • Siri Can’t Help You Close the Deal but Doing These Three Things Can!
    • August 9, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Sometimes Siri doesn’t actively listen and decides to send you somewhere different from where you asked her to navigate; a different city or town and/or a place that doesn’t sound remotely close to what you asked for. She gets in the way.

    So what do you do when Siri isn’t cooperating?  Do you give up and wing it?  Do you try again?  Do you stop navigating with Siri and switch to Google, Waze or your built-in system?  Do you persist until you get what you need?

    That’s exactly what salespeople are supposed to do.  Get creative, be persistent and find a way to reach the decision maker.  You do it with Siri, so why don’t you do it when someone in the company won’t introduce you to the decision maker, when they won’t give you the decision maker’s name or when they don’t cooperate?  Why do so many salespeople give up and plow forward with the contact they are speaking with right now?

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  • How Gas Grills, Gardening, Masks, and Baseball Mimic Your Sales Team
    • May 3, 2021
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    My project corresponds so well with how many executives approach their sales teams. 

    They do nothing for years, and then, after growing frustrated with complacency and inability to grow revenue, finally decide to make changes and rebuild their sales teams. 

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  • New Data Shows That Top Salespeople are 2800% Better at Disrupting the Flow
    • September 18, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Fish, rafts, kayaks, canoes, sailboats and swimmers all find much more success when they are moving with the wind or the current rather than going against it.

    Unfortunately, the same isn’t necessarily true in sales.

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  • How to Transform Your Sales Pipeline Today
    • July 8, 2019
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Flower gardens can be large, colorful, impressive and calming to look at.  Unfortunately, most sales pipelines are full of weeds, not large enough, and certainly not impressive.  From its evaluations and assessments of 1,875,978 salespeople, Objective Management Group (OMG) has found that only 46% of all salespeople maintain a full pipeline.  It breaks down as follows:

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  • 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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