sales management

  • Talking – 4th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture

    • October 14, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today, as part of my continuing series on the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture, I present:

    #4 – You Can Talk – It’s Your Mind that Has to Shut Up

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  • 3rd of the 10 Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture

    • October 13, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I went out of order in my last post  and presented #6 from my list of 10 Sales Competencies That are Key to Building Sales Cultures.

    In this post I present the real #2, The Enemy is Resistance.  I’ve written about this before too.

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  • Happy Ears – 2nd of the 10 Sales Competencies That Are Key to Building a Sales Culture

    • October 9, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This article focuses our attention on the 2nd of the  10 Sales Competencies That are Key to Building a Sales Culture.

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  • Customer Centric – 1st of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies for Building a Sales Culture

    • October 7, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    #1 – IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU!

    Believe it or not, there are a lot of people in sales who mistakenly believe that the world revolves around them. If my previous sentence said “show business” instead of “sales” it would make sense but this isn’t show business.

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  • Top 10 Sales Competencies

    • October 5, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    These aren’t the 10 sales competencies you read about and listen to all the time. No way!  These 10 are hardly ever discussed, seldom, if ever written about, and the most difficult to learn.  Ready?

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  • Do You Need Your Salespeople to Love and Respect You?

    • October 5, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I was coaching a sales manager whose reps were all under performing, even though many of them have a history of achieving and over achieving during less difficult times. Many salespeople with prior success have been struggling to match their past performances. The truth is that most of them just aren’t good enough to overcome the resistance that they face right now. The question is, what percentage of those struggles are due to the ineffectiveness of the salespeople and what portion lies with the ineffectiveness of their sales manager?

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  • A Forgotten Secret of Sales Success

    • October 1, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Brad Ferguson, my guest on this week’s edition of Meet the Sales Experts, shared a story about a bank he worked with.  Using Objective Management Group’s Sales Force Evaluation, he identified 8 bankers that weren’t right for the business development roles they were in.  After both the voluntary and involuntary turnover of 7 of them, the bank increased new business revenue by 30% from the 5 remaining bankers.  What did Brad have them do?  It was relatively simple, really.  He had them identify and focus on specific behaviors they could measure, required them to perform specific levels of those behaviors, and held them accountable.  Listen to the show to hear more.

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  • 5 Steps to Coaching Your Salespeople Beyond Happy Ears

    • September 29, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Today I posted this article about Diagnosing and Overcoming Happy Ears on the Baseline Selling web site.  And last week I wrote this article about Happy Ears and an empty pipeline.

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  • Understanding the Sales Force – Top 100 Blogs

    • September 28, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It’s been a pretty good week for getting honored.

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  • Why Some Lousy Salespeople Can’t Get Any Better

    • September 18, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Chris Mott returned to Meet the Sales Experts this week and provided us with a show packed with good information.

    We were discussing salespeople who don’t improve, aren’t motivated to do better and who resist training, development and coaching efforts of sales managers and outside experts.  Chris said that much of this behavior is due to negative personal experiences that these salespeople had when being sold to by other, basically, horrible salespeople. 

    So I believe that as a result of this two things happen:

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