• Surprising New Data on Salespeople Busts the Myths about Relationship Selling and Social Selling

    • June 16, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    I had a theory about salespeople, but didn’t have the data to prove it out.  I believed that social selling was a godsend to those in sales who were not great at relationship building – that by utilizing applications like LinkedIn and Twitter, they could reach out to new people, but with the benefit of hiding behind the glass screen. Do you think I was right?  Or wrong?

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  • Effective Selling is Less about the Words and More About How You Say Them

    • April 25, 2016
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Whether you are trying to convince a prospect, customer or salesperson, make sure you emphasize the how over the what and your message has a much better chance of being accepted in the spirit you intended.

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  • Getting Deals Closed – End of Quarter Sales Gone Mad

    • March 3, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    In the 26 years that I’ve been helping companies grow and develop sales and revenue, I have rarely met with an executive for the first time and not heard about —it.

    It all begins around week 11 of the quarter. A frenzy of calls, increased activity, sales management and sometimes C-Level intervention, discounts, offers that can’t be refused, and more. For 3 weeks every quarter, the entire sales force – hell, the entire company – takes on a do whatever it takes attitude to bring those deals in house.

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  • Did Your Salespeople Choose to Be in Sales?

    • January 5, 2011
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Even if you reviewed as many resumes as I do each week you might not notice this:  Most sales candidates did not have a sales position as their first job after college.  Most started as something else and then, out of the blue, they were in sales, sales management, marketing, or business development.  I always get suspicious when somewhere back in time a candidate went from Purchasing to Sales Management and never sold along the way…

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  • Top 10 Outcomes That Should Come from Sales Coaching

    • December 14, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    When you coach a salesperson, which words should you hear that would tell you the session was effective?

    Not “Thanks” or “OK”.

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  • How to Determine if Your Sales Process is Effective

    • December 8, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Can you reverse engineer your sales calls? 

    OTHER THAN THE PART OF YOUR SALES CALL THAT INVOLVES PRESENTING, could you break down and explain, each step, strategy, tactic, question, response and milestone met, in the order they occurred, why they were chosen, and the resulting reaction of each occurrence, AFTER you’ve completed an entire sales cycle?

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  • The Difference Between Selling to Negotiators and Price Shoppers

    • February 2, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Salespeople often confuse the prospect who needs to negotiate with one who must have the lowest price and as Michael says so often in his article, nothing could be further from the truth. 

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  • 18 Business Trends For Your Sales Force

    • January 21, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    Before they handled one caller’s sales force challenges (excellent stuff) , they commented on the state of business out there right now.

    They see:

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  • What is Maximum Effort on the Sales Force?

    • January 11, 2010
    • Posted by: Dave Kurlan
    • Category: Understanding the Sales Force

    here is a third type of salesperson, one of the elite top 5%, who can consistently maintain maximum effort for much of the year.  But that salesperson isn’t the norm.  So the questions that come from this are these:

    Are the top 5%’ers A players or super human players?

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  • Sales Success Secrets From Beyond the Grave

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

    Warning. I have included some very controversial material in this article so I’ll start with the easy stuff and finish with the material you may not want to read. I have some insights from three totally unrelated books as well as an unrelated article that I had a chance to read last week. I found common themes that relate directly to sales and sales management success. 

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