sales training

  • Why There is No Value When You Provide Value Via Special Pricing

    • September 29, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I was discussing the OMG Partnership opportunity with a gentlemen from Hong Kong, who objected to our reasonable licensing fees, refusing to pay any fees to a US company.  This is when the conversation began to resemble a sales call.  He did what a lot of buyers do to salespeople and began to boast about how well-positioned his company is to market OMG in Hong Kong and what a huge opportunity this would be for OMG.  He expected me to waive the fees in exchange for the great opportunity he described.

    Most salespeople – 74% to be exact – not wishing to jeopardize a great opportunity, start negotiating or worse, agreeing, to the unrealistic requests.  There are ripple effects to this, for example:

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  • Why You Must Understand This about Desire for Sales Success

    • August 20, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    One of the most frequent questions we get from clients has to do with the second most important finding on Objective Management Group’s (OMG) sales and sales management evaluations.  “This is one of my top salespeople – how can she possibly lack Desire for sales success?”

    It’s a great question and I hope to explain it fully here.

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  • Fine Tune Your Sales Force as You Optimize Your Computer

    • June 18, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I deleted about 10,000 sent items from Outlook, repaired the machine’s permissions, restarted the laptop, and it was performing to expectations again.  I was excited about what I had accomplished in such a short time!

    That process isn’t very different from what executives must do with an underperforming sales force.

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  • Key to Significantly Improve Sales Training Results

    • May 28, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    The best players, getting the advanced instruction on the travel teams, improve the most.  Those same kids, on their regular season team, learn almost nothing new and aren’t challenged or pushed.  Practice, and sometimes even the games, can be so boring for them that they don’t play their very best.

    Translation from Baseball to Selling

    If we translate all of that baseball to selling, the only two things that change are the activity and the age of the people being coached and trained.

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  • Top 5 Reasons Sales Prospects Ask for References

    • May 19, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Everything is going along great, your prospect seems quite interested, they’ve agreed with your points, accepted your pushback, you got them qualified and you’re heading for the home stretch.

    It doesn’t matter if this has all occurred in the last 45 minutes, or if this took place over a series of meetings, calls and months.  

    They ask for references.

    The best example of doing a lousy job in this area is the salesperson who was referred in, yet still gets asked for references!

    How a salesperson handles the request for references is crucial and most salespeople screw it up royally.

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  • What the Sales World Can Learn from Marathon Participants

    • April 23, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    While some professional runners enter a marathon, more than 30,000 people were simply participating because they could.  These participants have full-time jobs, careers and businesses.  This is a hobby.  Yet their commitment to this hobby should be embarrassing to most salespeople, who don’t put forth anywhere near this level of commitment, effort, time or practice into their own career!

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  • Rejection – Why it is the #1 Enemy in Modern Selling

    • April 3, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    For a change, rather than contributing to all the noise about inbound replacing outbound, inside replacing outside, insights replacing sales steps, buyers’ process replacing sales process, let’s talk about something that has a huge, relevant impact on selling, regardless of how the opportunity came to be.

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  • Global Warming, Social Selling and The Sales Force of Tomorrow

    • January 8, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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  • What Would You Do? Sales Force Attempts to Maintain Status Quo

    • January 6, 2014
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    This is what can happen when salespeople have zero concept of selling; when knowledgeable, technical people are moved into selling roles without being trained to sell; when the sales manager is more interested in selling than managing; when the president doesn’t hold the sales manager accountable; and when there isn’t a sales culture.

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  • Top 10 Kurlan Sales Articles of 2013

    • December 19, 2013
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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