sales performance
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Fire Your Top Salesperson: The Red Sox Lesson for Better Sales Teams
- June 18, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Can firing your top salesperson transform your team? The Boston Red Sox’s bold trade of Rafael Devers reveals how letting go of a problem performer can lead to big wins. Discover the sales team lesson in this surprising move.
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Why Salespeople Skip the Sales Process (And How It’s Killing Your Revenue)
- May 19, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Planting a fruit tree requires five simple steps in the right order—mess it up, and you’re left with dirt. Sales is no different, yet only 34% of salespeople follow a structured process. From mistaking methodologies for processes to winging it, discover why salespeople ditch the roadmap and how a proper sales process can boost revenue by 20%.
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Shania Twain’s Lesson for Sales Leaders Who Want to Hire Stronger Salespeople
- April 14, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Instead of seeking industry experience, a degree, and related characteristics, sales leaders must vet for the ability to succeed at selling to your specific audience, at your price point, and against your competition. That one difference takes the entire sourcing, screening, vetting, interviewing, selecting, hiring, and on-boarding process and turns it upside down. Different tools. Different process. Different sourcing. Different questions. Different answers. Different results.
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7-Steps to Achieve Sales Team Excellence
- October 9, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Any company and/or executive can initiate a sales transformation, but there is one dealbreaker that can cause a sales transformation initiative to fail. But you have to see it through. You must be visible. You must lead by example. You must be engaged. You must show how important this is. You must show your commitment.
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Hydrangeas Tell the Story of Underperforming Salespeople
- September 13, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You don’t have to stand by, throw your hands in the air, become frustrated and use hope as your strategy. When did hope even become a strategy? You don’t need to terminate these underperforming salespeople and replace them with new salespeople who might not get it done. Take matters into your own hands, get the help you need to actually develop your salespeople.
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The Biggest Mistake That Salespeople Make When Closing
- July 31, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Aggressive salespeople are no more effective than passive salespeople but if I had to choose one over the other I would take my chances with the aggressive salesperson and attempt to get them to tone it down. While the challenges with passive salespeople are obvious, there is one mistake I consistently observe being made by aggressive salespeople and wouldn’t you know it, the salesperson approached us and made the mistake. That made me want to sit in a messaging recliner to get the stress out.
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Is Fred a Top Salesperson or a Horrible Imposter?
- July 2, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Fred’s sales manager sees both sides. He told me that Fred is an imposter and the OMG evaluation perfectly described his sales capabilities. So yes, Fred is both a top salesperson and a horrible imposter.
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How to Easily Motivate and Incentivize Sales Pipeline Building
- June 20, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Music motivates me to do what I otherwise don’t really want to do. But while everyone is different, I’ve seen music work as a motivator for others too.
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Use Music to Understand the 12 Criteria Prospects Use to Buy from Salespeople
- June 12, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Yesterday, while watching our son play in a summer collegiate baseball game, I missed a step and tumbled all the way down the bleachers. Isn’t that a great analogy for what happens when you miss, or skip a crucial step in the sales process? More than half of all salespeople are missing and skipping important milestones in the sales process each and every day and their egos get more bruised from failing to close those opportunities than my body got bruised from my not so thrilling adventure to the ground.
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What If Pay Equity Comes to Sales Teams?
- February 28, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When pay equity comes to sales teams, top performers will be the group that is most affected. While it is too early to know whether their incomes will be reduced, they will be compensated equally with the worst performers on the team. If you are a top performer, and you are no longer earning significantly more than the worst performers in the company, what would you do? Here are some possibilities: