sales assessments
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Top 10 CEO Reactions to My Comments About Their Sales Forces
- August 23, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Just like the salespeople who work for them, CEO’s come in all different sizes, shapes, styles and flavors. As you can imagine, those variances influence the outcomes of sales force evaluations, sales infrastructure, sales and sales management development and sales recruiting. Here is a sampling of how some of the CEO’s react to what I tell them about their sales force:
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Case History – Sneak Preview of a Sales Candidate
- July 28, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It never ceases to amaze me when clients receive nasty-grams from sales candidates who are – let’s call it put-off – by the client’s request that they first take our on-line assessment. The candidates receive a very nice email thanking them for sending their resume, explaining the client’s recruiting process and asking them to take the assessment. You just wouldn’t believe some of the notes I’ve seen. Name calling, cussing, threats, sarcasm, and more.
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Top 5 Sales Recruiting Observations of 2010
- June 29, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today, I’ll make some observations about the sales recruiting activity taking place this summer that either reinforces some of the things I’ve said in the past, or modifies my original stance.
In no particular order, but of equal importance:
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Top 10 Reasons Why Sales Commitment Has Become More Important
- June 15, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
My recent analysis has shown that today, Commitment has overtaken Desire in importance and we will be reflecting that in assessments very shortly. But Why? What has caused this fundamental shift?
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The Delayed Impact of Lack of Sales Commitment
- June 2, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
While commitment is a single data point – not the be-all-end-all – it’s a very powerful and predictive data point as well.
If you are a client, upon learning that a top producer lacks commitment you might be asking, “How can that be?”
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Top 10 Tips for Hiring Salespeople for Your Sales Force
- May 24, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Today, we will discuss hiring for the sales force but not so much the “how” of it as much as the importance of doing it for the right reasons, at the right time and in the right manner.
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What Sales Leaders Don’t Know About Ego and Empathy
- May 12, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In the past week, three people had discussions with me about recruiting salespeople and suggested that the difference between successful and unsuccessful salespeople is that effective salespeople have empathy and ego.
These people probably use personality and behavioral styles assessments too. Those assessments, always poorly adapted for sales, feature empathy and ego. There are three things you must know when it comes to salespeople and their empathy and ego.
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How Do Companies Retain Their Underperforming Salespeople?
- April 30, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I explain the difference between lousy salespeople and good salespeople in terms of line items and investments in this article.
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Call Reluctance in Salespeople – Causes, Factors, and Predictors
- April 15, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Objective Management Group (OMG) has always been able to accurately (to 95%) predict whether a salesperson would succeed and provide conditions for employment. Over the years, we’ve been able to fine tune our accuracy even more as we incorporated some additional non-sales factors that made strong salespeople poor candidates for a particular role or company. Three of the most important, recent factors were:
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The Science of Selling – Rules versus Data
- February 25, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The true science in selling is the research and data that explain performance. In Baseball, a good or bad year, by a team or player, is not explained so much by whether the rules were followed – they probably were – but by the statistics that explain why a good or bad year occurred. We have the same thing in sales and Objective Management Group may have the mother load of that data.