Just when it seems that I don't have any more articles to write, another year has passed and I've now surpassed 1,800 articles on my Blog.  As with any other year, some are really good and some aren't as good but I try to inject my style of using analogies because everywhere I look I see a correlation to sales and sales leadership.

For example, as I look out the window, Dinger, our Golden Doodle, is trying to find a good place to do his business in the snow.  He picks a spot, rejects it, chooses another, rejects it, and circles around and gets distracted, and asks to come back inside without having done what he went out there to do.

To me, that sounds like a lot of salespeople!  They sit at their desk, open their list of prospects, come up with reasons not to call or follow up, finally choose a prospect they feel good about calling, get distracted by an incoming email, get a cup of coffee, go back to the computer, choose another contact, get distracted again, this time by social media, and leave for lunch without having done what they were supposed to do.

After reviewing the 50 or so 2019 articles, I have chosen the top 10 articles based on views, comments here and comments and likes on LinkedIn and Twitter..  Most of these articles rely on statistics from Objective Management Group and/or correlate to strong analogies.  Enjoy!

10 Most Popular Articles (Views, Comments and Likes)

1. The 14 Lies Preventing Salespeople from Getting Their Prospects into a Buying State of Mind

2. Change in Approach Leads to 304% Increase in Sales Effectiveness

3. The Top 8 Requirements for Becoming a Great Salesperson

4. How Big of a Role Does Age Play in Sales Effectiveness

5. The Best Salespeople are 2733% More Likely to Have This Than the Worst Salespeople

6. How All Those Trucks on the Road Can Help You Stop Discounting

7. New Data Shows That Top Salespeople are 2800% Better at Disrupting the Flow

8. Sales Process and Why So Many Salespeople Lose Their Way

9. How to Transform Your Sales Pipeline Today

10. The Best Salespeople are 791% Better at This Than Weak Salespeople

The Red Sox are my favorite baseball team but they didn't make the playoffs this year.  It doesn't always work out that my favorite teams are champions!  Similarly, five of my favorite articles from 2019 failed to make it into this year's top 10.  

My Favorites from 2019

1. The New Salesenomics

2. Did You Know That the Beatles Taught us about Selling

3. Your Last Chance to Make a Good First Impression

4. A Tale of Three Squirrels and Their Human Counterparts in Sales

5. New Data Reveals a Powerful New Score for Sales Effectiveness 

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I was in the basement of our home looking for something when I saw it.  It moved left to right, low, between the stored Christmas trees.  I took another look and this time it moved right to left.  Each time I moved, it moved.  I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it wasn't a critter but a shadow that I was casting.

I saw something that simply wasn't there.  A figment of my imagination.  You could even call it a hallucination.

Salespeople frequently have hallucinations where they think there is something there, like a great opportunity, and in reality, there isn't anything there.  Not even close.  And then there are the salespeople who don't see an opportunity when there is actually a great one hiding in plain site.

Let's talk about the many reasons that these scenarios occur.

Let's start with my top 10 reasons why salespeople hallucinate an opportunity where there is none:

1. The prospect seemed to like them and was open
2. The salesperson did so much talking that they failed to identify whether or not there was a compelling reason to buy
3. The prospect didn't voice an objection so the salesperson assumed that they were a go
4. The salesperson failed to differentiate but assumed they were effective
5. The salesperson failed to thoroughly qualify and assumed that it was all systems go
6. The sales manager did not inspect the opportunity or coach to the opportunity after it was updated in CRM
7. The prospect was not comfortable sharing and the salesperson was not comfortable challenging that
8. The prospect asked for a quote or proposal and the salesperson took that as a buying signal and went into facilitation mode
9. The salesperson began with a demo and the prospect, who was not the decision maker, thought it was nice to have but not a must have
10. The salesperson assessed all of the competition, the size of the company, how hard it would be to get the business and decided for the customer that it wasn't worth pursuing.

 If you or your salespeople are guilty of one or more of these selling sins, it's time to take professional selling more seriously.  Salespeople are hired and well paid to have sometimes difficult discovery conversations with sometimes difficult prospects.  Those who retreat to the office to quote are behaving like minimum wage facilitators.  Facilitating is easy while selling is challenging so do your job, push through the uncomfortable stuff and differentiate!

Coach your salespeople through all 10 of these difficult selling scenarios by attending our one-of-a-kind, two-day, Sales Leadership Intensive on June 4-5.  Two days of great training and discussion all oriented towards making you a master of sales coaching.  Visit http://kurlanassociates.com/sales-leadership-event.  As of May 15, 2019, we have 8 seats remaining and they won't last long! 

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Recently, I published an article that introduced a way to measure sales progress by means other than conventional numbers and metrics. 

Today, I received an email from a property leasing salesperson who had his own question about sales effectiveness.  He asked, "How do I determine if I am seeing results from me being a good salesman or if it’s from my sheer volume and what kind of selling would you say a Real Estate Salesperson uses most?"

I explained that there are four types of sales conversations and by conducting some self-analysis you can determine whether success or failure is the result of your own effectiveness, or because of your company's reputation, quality and features of your product or service, the timing of your conversation, or that you happen to have the lowest price.

These are the four types of sales conversations and potential outcomes that I shared:

1. They want to buy and you help and/or allow them buy from you.  You are not a factor in this decision - they are not buying due to your own effectiveness.
2. They haven’t yet decided to buy but you persuade them to buy from you.  You are a major factor in this decision as you caused them to make a decision and take action.
3. They haven’t yet decided to buy and you don’t persuade them to buy from you.  You are not a factor in this decision - they are not buying and you were not able to influence the prospect.
4. They want to buy and somehow you mess it up and they don't buy from you.  You are a huge factor in this decision.  They were predisposed to buy and something you did cause them to change their mind.

In the end, your effectiveness is determined by how consistently you achieve scenario #2, and how infrequently scenario #4 occurs.

If you have a lot of successful #2's and few to none #4's, it would appear that you are very effective.  If you have a measurable number of #4's, it is safe to assume that you are a crappy salesperson.  If you don't have a lot of #2's, you are somewhat ineffective.  If you have a lot of #1's, you have very little do with your own success.

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