sales recruiting

  • Latest Sales Recruiting Breakthrough – Download the New White Paper

    • April 12, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    About six weeks ago, I started a discussion and asked, How Long Should a Salesperson Stick?  I followed that up with a more researched discussion and provided The Top 5 Factors to Predict Sales Turnover.  Over the past six weeks I have continued to research the two subjects and the results of my work are now available in my brand new White Paper, “Sales Longevity – The Science of Predicting Sales Turnover”. 

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  • The Top 5 Factors to Predict Sales Turnover

    • March 5, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Here are the Top Five Factors to Predict Sales Turnover / Longevity

    The most important factor in predicting sales longevity is

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  • How Does the Secret of Happiness Affect Sales Motivation?

    • February 17, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Salespeople must be happy in order to succeed but we also know that they must want more than what they have in order to be motivated.  What is the balance between being happy and being dissatisfied?

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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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  • Recruiting – 4th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions

    • November 16, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    You must use an assessment – not just any assessment, but a world class, sales specific, predictive, customized assessment that will consistently identify people that will be top performers for you, in your business, calling into your market, with your pricing model and competition.

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  • You Have an 82% Chance of Making a Hiring Mistake When…

    • September 2, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    My guest on this week’s episode of Meet the Sales Experts was Ken Edmundson.  We were talking about hiring when he he said that there is an 82% chance of making a hiring mistake when management does not know how their candidate is wired.  He said it’s a mistake when they are fired, they quit, or they under achieve.  He went on to say that you can’t hire without an interview and a background check and you can’t hire by only doing those two things. 

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  • Teaching Sales in School is Like Learning to Golf on the Wii

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

    The article, “Can College Teach You to Sell?”, has its pros and cons.  Let’s start with the good stuff.

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  • 10 Lessons From the Sales Candidate Who Smelled Like He Peed on Himself

    • July 3, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    It was quite the claim.  I remember telling my client that the next candidate we were to interview was the best sounding candidate I had ever spoken with on the phone. Robert, the sales manager, went to the lobby to get the candidate and returned, an ashen look on his face.  Ray, the candidate, followed Robert into the conference room and suddenly, I had the same ashen look on my face.  It seemed that the best candidate I had ever spoken with by phone was, well, a bum!

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  • Hire the Best Salespeople on the Planet

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

    Several months ago Objective Management Group began to identify hirable candidates that are ideal – they will ramp-up more quickly than a normal hirable candidate. A normal candidate should ramp up according to this formula I devised many years ago:

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  • Don’t Make Assumptions About Sales Candidates

    • March 31, 2009
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I have previously shared many instances of sales candidate assessments coming to life with their email, voice mails and interview antics following the taking of our assessment.  While the following email is another example of that, it is an even better example of what happens when a skeptical client finally realizes it:

    The client wrote:

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