• Coconut Flakes Help to Improve Sales Effectiveness

    • November 6, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    authentic salespeople

    My wife took me to a Vegan restaurant for lunch and I ordered a sandwich that consisted of coconut, lettuce and tomato on multi-grain bread.  I not only didn’t hate it, I liked it.  I showed my wife that it had bacon in it and she swore it didn’t.  She suggested I ask the owner so I asked him about the bacon and he explained that he prepared the coconut flakes to have the look, taste and texture of bacon.  Fake bacon.

    There are fake salespeople too. 

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  • Resistant Salespeople Can Prevent Consistent, Strong Sales Results

    • June 27, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    resistance

    CEOs and Sales Leaders whose salespeople aren’t responding need to understand that their veteran salespeople are the same as my son when he was thirteen. 

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  • The Problem with Self-Directed Sales Training and its Role in Developing Salespeople

    • June 8, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    sales training

    Yesterday, Andy Miller and I delivered onboarding training to a group of new partners at Objective Management Group (OMG).  Andy reached the slide that said “Lunch” at the end of the day, and I spent most of the morning displaying only slide #2 which could have been covered in 10 minutes.  The spontaneous, robust discussion that broke out was not planned, but most importantly, it was not discouraged.  To the contrary, it was strongly encouraged.  The group learned more from that spontaneous two-hour discussion than they ever would have learned from the sterile slides.  Are slides bad?

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  • Sometimes The Biggest Sales Problems Have the Simplest Solutions

    • May 30, 2023
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
    sales problem

    There are simple, easy, fast and powerful solutions for sales problems too.  See my examples below.

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  • The Latest Perspective on My Most Popular Article on Selling

    • December 20, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    During a first sales call, suppose your salespeople hear one prospect say, “This has been a very interesting and productive conversation and we might have some interest in this.”  And imagine another prospect at the same meeting says, “We’ll get back to you next month and let you know what kind of progress we’ve made.”  And still a third might say, “In the meantime, please send us a proposal with references and timeline.”

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  • The Top 10 Sales and Sales Leadership Articles of 2022

    • December 12, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Criteria: Popularity (views) is nice but quality of content is nicer.  Likes are cool but engagement is cooler. Entertainment value counts and my opinion matters because I’m judging the articles.  In the end, I’m applying popularity, quality of the content, likes, entertainment, comments, engagement and my opinion to create this list of the top 10 articles.

    Enjoy!

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  • 5 Reasons Sales Teams Underperform Like My Old Wiper Blades

    • November 17, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I speak with a lot of CEOs and Sales Leaders from companies whose sales teams are underperforming.  One thing they seem to have in common is the mileage problem.  When I ask how long the sales team has been underperforming, it is usually the equivalent of 60,000 miles.  It’s not a new problem, the signs have been there for YEARS but something recently changed to the extent that they couldn’t tolerate it any longer.  The sales team’s performance was finally presenting a threat (safety) whereby one or more of revenue, earnings, sustainability, personal income, stock prices, turnover, market share, morale and more were at risk.

    What causes executives to wait so long?  Here are five potential reasons:

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  • How Your Sales Team Can Double its Win Rate in a Recession

    • September 26, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    A client was having great success using OMG (Objective Management Group) to assess their sales candidates and they assumed the sales candidate assessment was the only thing OMG offered.  When they learned that our core offering is evaluating their existing sales team they became excited about what that would mean for addressing their two biggest selling challenges.  

    One of their issues was their 20% win rate was much lower than they thought it should be and they believed their salespeople needed some refresher training on closing.  They also had a large number of opportunities stalled in the pipeline and they believed that training on more effective techniques to conduct follow up calls would help.

    In this article, I thought it might help if I share a bit of what they learned about their sales team.

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  • You Can’t Lose Customers or Salespeople – 2 Secrets to Their Retention

    • July 6, 2022
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    There were lots of articles that had the top 5, 7, 10, 12, and 15 reasons why salespeople leave or quit their jobs.  Most of those lists were simply subsets of other lists and the reasons included things like compensation, morale, workload, changing quotas, culture, toxic management, the job was misrepresented, too much pressure and lack of growth opportunity. While there were no surprises to these lists of reasons, I think there is a more pervasive reason that is not represented on the lists created by marketers and recruiters:

    Sales Selection. 

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