Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.
One of the coolest things about the work I do is the number of ways in which I see the results of an assessment come to life. Take this week for example. In an effort to assure that Baseline Selling launched successfully, tens of thousands of emails went out to sales candidates that were assessed in the last several months. The varied results of these emails included some book sales, thousands of undeliverable emails, some requests to be removed, thousands of deletions and my favorite - the expletive deleted response.
These usually read something like 'f**k you' or 'Up yours a*s hole' or 'remove me immediately you 'sh*t' or 'How'd you get my name you %^&*?'
Shocked? So was I. But they're still my favorites. They could have remembered taking my assessment, may have associated it with a job they were applying for, or, the mostly likely explanation is that this is their standard response to an email - even when it's from someone providing a professional tip in their line of work.
Were their responses any different from how they would likely treat a telemarketer who called? I would guarantee they would respond in much the same manner on the phone. If I were to perform a cross-reference on these rude, indignant, impolite and unprofessional salespeople, we would likely discover that the results of their assessment were quite poor.
Now you might be thinking that they behaved in this manner because of their poor assessment results but I would strongly disagree. Candidates aren't provided with their results so they wouldn't have known how strong or weak they were. Their reactions to an email or phone call suggest that the root cause is their hate of being sold to. It's that simple. I know for a fact that if they are in sales and they hate being sold to, they are pitiful salespeople. How do I know? They overcompensate by 180 degrees. They make sure that they don't do what successful salespeople do. They don't ask questions. They don't qualify. They don't close. They take lots of put-offs. They take their prospects at face value. And they believe they are performing a service. Result? They experience very few successes at selling while they might actually be OK at account management.
How many of those sales frauds are working at your company?
(c) Copyright 2006 Objective Management Group, Inc.
