Vultures or the Trusted Name in Sales Training?

Why Companies Come to Kurlan After Experiencing Sandler, Challenger, SPIN, and Value Selling

You’ve probably heard the whispers.

Or maybe you’ve said it yourself: “We tried Sandler… didn’t stick.” “Challenger sounded great, but our team couldn’t pull it off consistently.” “We did SPIN for two years—great questions, zero pipeline growth.” “Value Selling? Solid framework, but it didn’t move the needle on close rates.”

Then they call or write to us.

We get a ton of business from companies that have already invested time, money, and energy into one (or more) of the big-name methodologies—Sandler, Challenger, SPIN, Value Selling, you name it—and walked away frustrated, underwhelmed, or straight-up disappointed.

So the question hangs in the air: Does that make us vultures? Circling overhead, waiting for the latest sales training flavor of the month to crash and burn so we can swoop in for the scraps?

Or does it make us the sought-after experts—the ones companies turn to when everything else has failed because we actually deliver sustainable, repeatable results?

So what gives? Here’s what actually happens.

Most of those other approaches are strong methodologies. Sandler flips the power dynamic. Challenger pushes insight and teaching. SPIN nails the questioning sequence. Value Selling ties everything to measurable outcomes. They’re not bad—they’re just incomplete on their own.

They tend to focus on what happens inside the sales conversation (tactics, questions, reframes, control), but they often treat the bigger picture—the actual sales process—as an afterthought. Or worse, they squeeze their entire methodology into one or two stages of what should be a four-stage (or more) journey from target to close.

That’s where Baseline Selling is different. It’s built as a milestone-centric process first (think baseball diamond: get to first, second, third, home), with consultative methodologies layered on top where they fit best. We don’t ask salespeople to abandon what they already know; we give them a visual, intuitive framework that sticks because it’s simple, buyer-focused, and predictive.

The data backs it up. Only about a third of salespeople actually follow any kind of sales process consistently. The rest? They wing it, skip steps, or force-fit a methodology that doesn’t align with how real buyers actually buy. That’s why close rates stall, pipelines leak, and revenue flatlines—even after “the training.”

When companies come to us post-Sandler/Challenger/SPIN/Value failure, they’re not looking for another flavor. They’re looking for something that finally works: a process they can customize, that their salespeople will actually use, and that drives measurable improvement in win rates, sales cycle length, and revenue.

So no, we’re not vultures.

We’re the team that gets called in when the patient has already seen three specialists, tried all the trendy meds, and is still sick. We’re the ones who finally diagnose the root issue and prescribe something that heals.

If your company has been through the methodology merry-go-round and you’re still stuck in the same revenue rut, maybe it’s time to stop chasing the next big thing and start building a real, repeatable sales engine.

We’re not here to pick at the carcass. We’re here to help you win the game. Reach out and we can make it better.

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In the past year, I have been using Grok from Xai to proof articles, suggest changes, and provide the SEO package (excerpts, keyword phrases, tags, meta descriptions, images, image ALT text, and image descriptions for my last 65 or so articles. With the amount of writing I do, it saves me several hours per week and the help is better/faster than what could be provided by an assistant.

For this article, I had the “vultures or trusted name?” concept, and decided to learn if Grok was ready to write as me. I asked Grok, “At this point, from all of the articles I have pasted into your interface for feedback, you must know my subject, style and voice. I’m spitballing an idea for an article based on this:   We get a lot of business from companies who have tried and failed with Sandler, Value Selling, SPIN and Challenger. Does that make us vultures? Or does that make us sought-after experts?   Would you like to attempt writing a draft?”

Grok answered with, “Hey Dave, Yeah, I’ve got a solid feel for your style from the stuff you’ve shared—straight-shooting, no-BS takes on sales reality, backed by data from OMG assessments, a bit of baseball flavor when it fits, and that mix of blunt honesty with practical insight. You call out what actually works (and what doesn’t) without sugarcoating, and you love flipping common perceptions on their head.

“Your spitball idea is gold—it’s provocative without being arrogant, and it plays perfectly into the “we’re the fix after the fixes failed” narrative you’ve built around Baseline Selling being more process-oriented and sustainable than a lot of the popular methodologies.

“Here’s a draft for you. I aimed for your voice: conversational, confident, data-ish where it counts, and ending with a punch that makes readers think (or reach out). Feel free to tweak, cut, or tell me to rewrite it with more/less edge.”

Me again. So, for the first time ever, this is the unedited article Grok wrote for me, and as me.

The image was created by Grok Imagine and Grok wrote the prompt for the image based on what I asked for.