sales pipeline
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Grammar – Why Commas Provide Sales Success Where Periods Fail
- July 19, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The problem is one of grammar. All of the articles you read, videos you watch and audios you listen to suggest that there is a key to sales success. Period. But if you change the period to a comma, you’ll quickly see that all of these things are crucial to success in sales.
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Predict the Weather but Control the Sales Forecast and Revenue
- June 6, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You may be familiar when the rant sounds like: “It’s almost the end of the quarter, we’re only at 65% of forecast, the pipeline is half empty, and nothing is closing. With the exception of 3 nice deals that came in during May, our salespeople have sucked.”
While the crappy weather and your crappy 2nd quarter revenue have crappy in common, there is one huge difference that can help you hit your sales forecast even when the weather forecast is for rain.
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Veteran’s Great Quote Makes News and Has Terrific Lessons for the Sales Profession
- February 21, 2017
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I might not have nailed his quote word for word, but I’m sure I captured the gist of it. Just think of the sales lessons that can be taken from this! The short video below is from the interview and below that I will share some lessons for the sales profession.
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It’s Coming Sooner Than You Think – 5 Keys to Prepare Your Sales Force for the Recession
- March 10, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
You remember the last recession – the great recession – right? I remember that in November of 2008, the business stopped coming in as if someone had turned off the faucet. Bam! We lost a third of our revenue overnight – and we were prepared for it! I predicted the last recession as early as September of 2006 with this article and in the summer of 2008 with this article.
In my business, I can see two trends ahead of others and I began seeing both of those factors begin to kick in last month. Do you know what they are?
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Sure Fire Way to Know Which Sales Opportunities are the Best Sales Opportunities
- February 24, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I just love it when cool gets cooler and I’m not talking about the winter weather in New England. About a month ago, I wrote this article on Targeting and shared a generic model for scoring opportunities. George Bronten and Henrik Oquist, CEO and COO of Membrain, took note and developed the concept as a new feature for their world-class CRM application, Membrain. You have to see how we integrated this new feature into the Baseline Selling version of Membrain. In the image below, you can see that we added a scoreboard milestone at two stages of the sales process.
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What True Story Does Your Sales Pipeline Tell You about Your Business?
- November 5, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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Sales Slumps – What Causes Them and How to Fix Them
- September 28, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
During the course of a baseball season, both hitters and pitchers fall into slumps. In basketball, players slump with their outside shots and from the foul line. Football Quarterbacks go into passing slumps. Golf and Tennis pros have swing slumps. Tiger has been in a slump since Thanksgiving of 2009! (I’m sure there must be some kind of a slump that Soccer players can fall victim to, but I don’t know enough about soccer to weigh in.) With slumps being so common, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that salespeople get into slumps too. In this article, we’ll explore what causes salespeople to get into slumps, what their slumps look like, and how can they be fixed.
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A Guaranteed Fix for Inaccurate Sales Forecasts
- September 15, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Are your expectations completely unrealistic when you attempt to forecast sales for the month or quarter? For most companies, inaccurate forecasts are the norm and expectations for accuracy are insane. But that’s when companies rely on CRM applications with any of the following 10 challenges:
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The Conversation Sales Leaders Must Have with Salespeople
- July 15, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Mark was right. It turned out that we did not have a deal, as the vice president’s peer in networking was blocking it. We eventually got a meeting with him and won the deal. More important, Mark set the tone: Sloppiness would not be tolerated.
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An Ode to the Evolution of the Pipeline
- July 13, 2015
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Selling – the art and science of getting people who didn’t necessarily want what you have, to pay you a premium for it. Before you can sell anything, you must have some people to sell it to! Fill the pipeline today!