sales hiring
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Case History – How Not to Hire Salespeople
- April 2, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A company wants to hire 5000 salespeople – but why?
2000 drop out before completing training, and another 2000 drop out during the first 90 days in the field. Another 500 drop out during the first 6 months, and at the end of the year they only have 500 of the original 5000 standing. What would it be worth to them from a cost, time, resources and practicality standpoint for us to simply identify, in advance, the final 500, before anyone is hired?
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3 Powerful Excuses for Maintaining Mediocrity in Your Sales Hiring
- January 26, 2010
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When I answered questions from the audience, the best one, in my opinion, was the most obvious. It went something like this:
“If your recruiting process works so effectively, and your assessments are so predictive, and they save so much time and money and consistently identify top performers, then why don’t more companies use them?”
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Sales Assessment Completion Time May Impact Validity of the Findings
- December 14, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
How would you like to influence the development of our never-ending quest for improvement in our suite of world-class assessment tools? We constantly seek ways to expand our world-class insights, legendary accuracy, and real-world relevance.
I just reviewed some new data that shows the percentage of Sales Candidate Assessments that are completed in a particular amount of time.
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Sales Assessment Comparison – Objective Management Group versus Devine
- September 14, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
It’s not often that we get to compare the assessment results of an individual that took our assessment and another. Why? Because most companies don’t use multiple assessments that report on similar findings. Notice that I said “report on” and not “look at”.
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10 Steps to Record-Breaking Sales Revenues
- June 30, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When things loosen up (and things will loosen up) and companies and consumers both begin spending money again, you could be in for a significant windfall. You may even have some record breaking revenue months if, and it’s a big if, you have your sales force doing all of the right things, even while companies and consumers aren’t spending money.
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The Sales Force with Over Achievers That Don’t
- March 26, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I heard about a CEO who told one of my colleagues that all of his salespeople over achieve. In the same phone conversation he mentioned that sales are down 20%. Can you imagine where sales would be if his salespeople under achieved?
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The CEO Who Needed to Hire Salespeople
- February 25, 2009
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday I spoke with a CEO who asked for some help recruiting salespeople. It seems that the salespeople they had previously hired had failed. As I learned more about their business, a few things became obvious to me:
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Tale of Two Assessments – Comparing Value
- December 18, 2008
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A potential client wanted to know how Objective Management Group could justify the cost of a our license (unlimited candidate assessments for one year or until the specified number of salespeople are hired) versus what seemed at face value to be a lower cost for DISC assessments.
There are several factors here but they are all worth noting.
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Misleading Statistics and Hiring the Wrong Sales Candidates
- November 3, 2008
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The November issue of Fortune Small Business has an article called Entrepreneurial Myth Busters. FSB has Ken Blanchard (consultant )and Scott Shane (academic) go head to head answering questions about small businesses and entrepreneurship. While Blanchard provides insightful answers based on his years of experience working in, consulting to and writing about business, Shane provides surprising answers based on data. I’m sure that if you read the article you’ll agree that Shane’s data lead to some very misleading conclusions. Academics who haven’t been “out there” can fall in love with their data!
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The Sales Assessment as Crystal Ball
- October 16, 2008
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Not all sales assessments are created equal.
That’s an understatement.
Yet it’s when a client pushes back – not when they look at the recommendation or prediction and accept it – that we get an opportunity to bring our sales assessment to life.