I'm sitting in the back of the room of a Rockefeller Habits two-days workshop being hosted by one of my companies, Kurlan Associates.

There are about 45 executives in the room, many of them clients of Kurlan Associates.  At two of the tables are clients that have been with the firm for so long, twenty years or so, that they have become great friends and two of them have become business partners at Objective Management Group.

One of the first exercises that the group participated in was Cash Optimization Strategies, and the first part of that exercise was Ways to Improve Your Sales Cycle.

Imagine my surprise when my oldest client (1985), my two best friends, my two business partners, identified "we need to follow a sales process" as the number one way to improve their sale cycle at their packaging company.

Forget that I wrote Baseline Selling - a sales process.

Forget that I'm with them quite often.

Forget that I trained them on a sales process 20 years ago.

Forget that these concepts are being discussed and reinforced on a regular basis.

Instead, think about how easy it is to get away from the fundamental processes, strategies and tactics that impact efficiencies, time lines, effectiveness, consistency, communication, confidence revenue and profit.

Take 3 steps back.  What have you gotten away from?

If you've gotten away from it, it's very difficult to remember what you don't do any more.

When I coach salespeople, I ask them to identify a call that didn't go the way they had wanted.  Most salespeople, the first few times through the coaching process, can't identify a single one of those calls.  It's hard to remember what you aren't paying attention to.

Sometimes it takes a sales force evaluation to identify the things your sales force isn't doing, never did, and can't do effectively

(c) Copyright 2008 Dave Kurlan