sales training
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The Waffle Cone and the Mass Production of Salespeople
- July 2, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For me, today’s waffle cones are a constant disappointment because they always fail to meet my expectations.
What does this have to do with selling?
Think about salespeople as a version of the waffle cone. In some companies, they are made fresh, and in other companies, especially bigger companies, they are mass-produced.
There are many ways of looking at th
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Top 10 Reasons Why Salespeople Let Price Drive the Sale
- May 10, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Selling value.
What comes so easily to the top 6% and some of the top 26% is so very difficult for others.
Most salespeople have little capability to effectively build value. Talking about what your company does better or differently or telling a prospect what your value proposition is does not build value. Instead, value comes from 3 things:
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Sales Management Best Practices – Are Top Salespeople Challengers?
- April 29, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I don’t promote an approach based on either Relationships or Solution Selling, but both must be incorporated into an appropriate sales approach. Also worth noting, the approach or methodology is only one part of selling. Without a sales process and a sales model, no methodology will work very well on its own.
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Why Salespeople Won’t Abandon the Early Demo and Presentation
- March 4, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you want your sales force to strive for sales excellence, the bottom line is that your salespeople won’t drive this transition and neither will a sales manager. You have to drive it. You must commit to it and it must be a sustained commitment. It’s not a do-it-yourself project, so you must also be prepared to do it correctly, get help from a results-oriented firm, and lead by example.
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How the Landscape Quickly Changes on Your Salespeople
- February 27, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Give your salespeople these two pictures and the next time they begin to think that everything seems wonderful, make sure they remember to brush the snow away, take off their rose colored glasses, and learn what the landscape truly looks like underneath the false interest.
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Sales Excellence Studies Propagate Mediocrity
- February 26, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
If you conduct a Google search for “sales excellence studies”, you’ll find more than 20,000 results. I’m sure that some results point to surveys which were conducted by others, but either way, that’s a lot of studies on sales excellence. If any of those studies were actually ground-breaking, insightful or truly representative of sales excellence, there would probably be fewer than a dozen. But there are not. There are many reasons why these studies are so lame, but let’s name just a few:
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View From the Top – When Salespeople Call on Purchasing
- February 19, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The single question that salespeople ask more than any other is, “When I’m with Purchasing, they don’t seem to have a compelling reason to buy and don’t care about our value-add. What can I do?” I’ll answer that question shortly. First, I have an analogy to help you see it from my perspective.
Take an elevator up at least 20 floors in Manhattan and immediately you’ll notice that the view from the top is mostly yellow – a sea of taxis mixed in with some limos and buses. From high above Manhattan, I saw these comparisons:
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To Salespeople, Demos and Presentations are Like Snack Food
- February 11, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Prior to learning about healthy eating, I believed a bagel was a healthy alternative to a donut. After I was shown that a carbohydrate converts to sugar in the blood and there wasn’t much difference between bread, bagels or rolls; and donuts, cake or pie, I changed the way that I ate.
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Top 5 Insights From Latest Sales Organization Studies
- February 7, 2013
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The folks over at IKO Systems were nice enough to send me a collection of infographics which they call 66 Crazy Sales Figures. I finally had a chance to read through it and found 5 sales figures which, after I combined them, are quite interesting:
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Top 10 Problems with Veteran Salespeople
- January 28, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For companies who want to grow revenue, veteran salespeople cause more problems than any other factor. After all, if you have a young, energetic group, there’s nowhere to go but up and everyone knows that they need to improve. On the other hand, veteran salespeople believe that they know everything and everyone and probably could lead the sales training class.