The Sales Archaeologist

I haven’t really written a post based on historic events in quite a while so this post is somewhat of a throwback to where this blog started.

I love the show Shark Tank on ABC. Entrepreneurs enter and meet with these business celebrities in hopes of getting their idea or their existing business backed by one of these "sharks". They are looking for financial help but they are also hoping to gain valuable expertise from one of these tycoons so that they can grow their business bigger and do that faster than they could alone. They have to sell their idea and their business to them but they also have to have to sell themselves! Let’s also give credit to the BBC for their show Dragons Den which was after all was the first version of a show like this that I had seen.

Maybe you have already read this article in the Harvard Business Review regarding the prevalence of dishonest communication via email as compared to face to face communication. This is probably not a huge surprise for most of us – if we have been in sales any length of time we realize two things:

I was speaking with another sales development person a few days ago and we were getting pretty deep into subjects related to the organic growth of a business. Interestingly it is an expression we hear pretty often when we are talking to a CEO regarding the ways we help. We usually hear the phrase being used to explain how a company has got to where they are – “all of growth has been organic to this point”. I think that sometimes we hear this because so many people think it sounds good, but does it?

Over the weekend I had the chance to see the Iron Lady with Meryl Streep . I am not usually a huge fan of Meryl but I must say she did an excellent job portraying the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and an excellent job bringing the character and qualities to life.

Let me begin by inviting you to dowload this case study on a technology company which you might find to be an extremely interesting way to learn more about the power of what we do here at Kurlan and Associates.

When you think about asking great questions maybe like me you think of great interviews. I enjoy watching people like David Frost , Larry King and James Lipton skillfully ask questions of whomever they have in the chair and get great information, humorous stories and the truth out of their guests.

I was really inspired to write this post by this recently published great article about 7 bad habits of executives. That got me thinking about the bad habits that sales people can sometimes “acquire” as they go about their business. Oddly enough some of these bad habits are shaped by the prospects that they encounter – kind of like having a battle strategy that is planned by an opposing general or a football team asking their top rival “how would you like us to play?”

The term “cost of sales” is usually one that we associate with CFO’s and EVP’s of Finance – not one that we typically discuss with sales people or sales leadership. That’s a shame because the concept has merit and of all the people that should be concerned with sales cost, one would think it should be the sales side of any organization.

In 1977 Tenerife airport  was home to the worst air disaster ever recorded. I was reading about the incident, which killed almost 600 passengers, and the details related to this horrible event prompted me to take a closer look at some of the worst commercial airline disasters in history. Not sure if that was the best idea since I have been on planes every week lately...