- February 1, 2025
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force

If you are driving your car, looking at your phone, fiddling with your radio, looking at people on the sidewalk, weaving in and out of traffic or speeding because you’re in a hurry, you are probably not a very good driver and bad things will happen.
If you have a pile of files on your desk, a to-do list that is so long it must be scrolled to read, past-due proposals, and a pipeline that doesn’t have enough opportunities, you are probably not very well organized, don’t manage your time very well, and likely behind on quota.
These things prevent people from being as effective as they could be, or need to be. Another one is when a sales leader has a Non-Supportive Buy Cycle along with an attribute of needing to think things over. In the 4-minute video below, which you must watch to understand the concept, I explain how the indecisiveness of a sales leader prevents sales leaders from being able to develop, coach up and grow their sales team. As you continue reading, I will also explain how it impacts their salespeople.
Pretty amazing, isn’t it?
The same concept derails salespeople too. Not just the need to think it over, but especially when they look for the best price, or think a relatively small amount of money is a lot of money. When Buy Cycle appears as a negative, those three attributes prevent salespeople from selling value. Sure, they understand value from an intellectual standpoint, but they are asking prospects to behave in a way that contradicts how they normally behave. It is very difficult to defend the value when salespeople don’t personally buy value.
Fortunately, when salespeople fix their Non-Supportive Buy Cycles, sales increase by an incredible 50%. Buy Cycle is just one of 21 Sales Core Competencies and you can see all 21 competencies, the data behind them, and even how you and/or your sales team compare, by clicking here. If you want to learn more about Buy Cycle, I wrote about it in this article.
Back to sales leaders. Not being decisive is not the only belief/behavior that would prevent a sales leader from effectively coaching up a salesperson. There are dozens of other non-supportive sales leadership beliefs and the more of them a sales leader possesses, the more ineffective they will be.
It’s hard enough to get sales leaders to coach consistently but when they do, they typically see an average revenue increase of 28%.
It’s even more difficult to get sales leaders to coach effectively. When they do both – effective and consistent, they typically see an increase in their team’s revenue of 42%.
When there is a sales leader who is willing to both coach and coach the right way, it’s a shame when their beliefs that get in the way. Want some help?
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