sales leadership
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Wouldn’t Sales Call Play-by-Play Analyses be Fun?
- January 27, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Most sales managers protect their salespeople instead of pushing them to improve. Most companies set budgets that formulaically increase year-over-year budgets by just 3.5%. The sales recruiting process and selection criteria at most companies are horrible. Most sales training is product-focused instead of sales development. Most salespeople are not consistently or effectively coached. Most senior sales leaders are indifferent about doing anything about those things.
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Top 10 Sales and Sales Leadership Articles of 2021
- December 7, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
There are several criteria for choosing the top articles of the year, including, but not limited to:
Views (Article)
Popularity (likes on LinkedIn and Twitter)
Engagement (comments to the article, via email, and on LinkedIn)
Personal (my favorites)
Value (insights for the community) -
Can You Find The Perfect Sales Candidates for Your Sales Team?
- December 1, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I am helping one company find a single needle-in-a-haystack sales leadership candidate and it has taken nearly six months. I am helping another company find 3 sales leaders and received 3,765 applications. What’s the difference?
For the answer to be meaningful, we have to look at the entire job market, not just sales candidates.
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The Baseball Experience That Continues to Generate a 28% Increases in Sales
- February 10, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The challenge isn’t whether or not they’ll enjoy and benefit greatly from the training. The challenge is getting sales leaders to attend the training! There’s a little matter of ego. Most successful sales leaders have fairly large egos and while their egos helped spur them on to their current roles, now that they’re in their current roles, their egos sometimes obstruct their ability to improve, ask for help, and bring professional training into their companies. The voice in their head whispers thoughts like:
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Are Sales Managers Coaching More Frequently Now That Everyone is at Their Desks?
- January 14, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
We know how sales managers were doing before the pandemic. It wasn’t very good and I wrote about it in November which had data for the last 10 years. What do you think would be different if I filtered the data to show only the last six months of 2020, the time during which sales managers should have already made changes? Do you think it got better, worse, or stayed the same?
Let’s find out.
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Key to Successfully Hiring Salespeople: Getting it Right Versus Getting it Over With
- December 21, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Recruiting salespeople doesn’t need to be difficult or complicated, but it is a process and needs to be completed thoroughly and correctly. Ask yourself this question: eighteen months from now, would you prefer to have spent five months to get it right and have a productive new salesperson, or three months getting it over with, only to have to do it again four months later, and again four months after that.
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Is Your Sales Force More Like a Dunkin’, Starbucks or Panera Drive Thru?
- January 21, 2020
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
This all begs the question, is the sales force at your company more like the Dunkin’, Starbucks, or Panera drive-thru? Today’s article will explain how to answer that question.
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How Sales Coaching Utilizes a Quid Pro Quo
- October 24, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Quid pro quo is all the rage. The news networks are pointing to and from quid pro quo and arguing whether it was or wasn’t implied. Regardless of which side of the political spectrum you’re on, you’ve probably heard it plenty more than you need to.
Could there be a sales coaching lesson here?
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Popularity Polls are Just Like Sales Management Tracking Metrics!
- January 8, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Have you ever watched a news program where they presented poll results, like the number of people in favor of legalizing marijuana? The poll shows popular opinion, but not the facts, logic, or impact on arrests, the economy, traffic accidents, unemployment, addiction, death rates, etc. There is a huge difference between people’s often uninformed opinions, versus what the facts might suggest. That’s the problem with the statistics I’m going to share in this article. The stats show what sales managers are doing but those managers are largely uninformed. They don’t know what’s good for them, haven’t been asked or held accountable to doing it differently, and aren’t in any way shape or form following best practices. John Pattison, Objective Management Group’s COO, mined some data on salespeople who report to sales managers. I was appalled by what I saw. Check this out!
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Glue – The Missing Element That Makes Every Sales Training Initiative Successful
- February 26, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I find that even the most seasoned and resistant of salespeople get to this point: When they realize how much more there is to selling, how much more effective they can be, how much more business they could generate, how they don’t need to have the best price, and how much easier selling can be, they become eager learners. That brings us to the question to be answered in today’s article: If most salespeople become eager learners and embrace good sales training, why don’t all companies experience equally tremendous revenue growth from sales training?