sales team evaluation
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Resistant Salespeople Can Prevent Consistent, Strong Sales Results
- June 27, 2023
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
CEOs and Sales Leaders whose salespeople aren’t responding need to understand that their veteran salespeople are the same as my son when he was thirteen.
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Can a New Sales Manager Be a Difference Maker?
- November 9, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I speak with so many sales leaders who tell me about the four sales managers they went through in the last two years. I speak with CEOs who tell me about the three sales VPs they went through in the last eighteen months.
There is tremendous pressure to fill these roles because your team’s performance will suffer without someone at the helm. Or is that misinformation? How much worse could a team perform than how they perform under a sucky sales manager?
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How Your Sales Team Can Double its Win Rate in a Recession
- September 26, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
A client was having great success using OMG (Objective Management Group) to assess their sales candidates and they assumed the sales candidate assessment was the only thing OMG offered. When they learned that our core offering is evaluating their existing sales team they became excited about what that would mean for addressing their two biggest selling challenges.
One of their issues was their 20% win rate was much lower than they thought it should be and they believed their salespeople needed some refresher training on closing. They also had a large number of opportunities stalled in the pipeline and they believed that training on more effective techniques to conduct follow up calls would help.
In this article, I thought it might help if I share a bit of what they learned about their sales team.
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Which is Worse – The Boston Red Sox or Your Sales Team?
- August 23, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
The construction of the Red Sox roster is simply a Stupid as Shit Strategy or SaSS. Use of the word strategy means that it’s intentional and is a disservice to the word stupid!
Sales team construction usually lacks formal strategy and that suggests something accidental is at play. We tend to see the “we already had these salespeople” and then “these are the new salespeople who were willing to work for us.” New is a relative term as the newest 30% of the team continues to churn when and if they find candidates.
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The Recession is Here – How to Take Advantage and Prepare Your Sales Team
- May 31, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
So what must you do to prepare your sales team and how can you leverage the effects of a recession?
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5 Steps to Grow Sales by 33% in 12 Months
- May 11, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sales teams go through periods like this too but sales leaders rarely seek out the data that would immediately point to the real problem. They tend to hope things will improve and go from there. However, there are several levels of data to be reviewed so let’s take a look.
As the article title suggests, there are five steps you must take to grow sales by 33% in 12 months. You can’t pick and choose as all five are required.
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Do You Know the Accurate Reason Why a Salesperson Is Not Performing?
- April 20, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
How quickly can you determine why a salesperson is failing?
Dinger loves to play catch with his ball. He has seven of them but loves his white ball the most. When we’re out playing catch and I point to a ball and say, “there it is” or “right there” or “get it” he just can’t seem to find it! Dinger has good listening skills but his ability to see the obvious isn’t very good.
Such was the case earlier this week when a surprised client wanted an explanation for why one of their salespeople, who does not perform very well, scored well on his evaluation. “How can someone who is not my top performer score better than someone who is my top performer?”
That sounded like a challenge so I said, “Let’s go!”
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The Philosophy of a Pitching Coach Will Improve Your Sales Team
- April 4, 2022
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I find ideas and material for this Blog everywhere, especially when I’m not looking for them. Yesterday I received a daily email from a Paul Reddick, a baseball coach who was drumming up some business for his baseball institute. It resonated – not for its baseball coaching – but as sales coaching. Here’s what it said:
If your coach is talking about any of the pitching flaws that you see listed above…
Run… Run Fast!
That Coach is working on “flaws” that will have no impact on your pitching. He is working on symptoms… not the illness! He is trying to fix things that are happening as a byproduct of incorrect movement early in your delivery. If you get the first second of your delivery right, almost all of these flaws get fixed instantly.
Do you know how this applies to sales?
I’ll explain exactly how it applies and I promise you will be surprised! Click here to read last year’s fun article comparing pitcher’s fielding practice (PFP) to role-playing in sales.
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Salesenomics – Many Sales Organizations Are Stuck in the 1980’s
- November 22, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When was the last time you saw a black and white television or even a console color TV?
How about an electric typewriter?
Or a car that didn’t have anti-lock brakes?
You would have to return to the 1980’s to see those things and when it comes to their operations, some sales organizations are still in the 1980’s.
For example, check out these statistics from OMG’s evaluations of 30,000 sales teams and more than two million salespeople.
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How To Stop Sucking by Understanding and Changing Your Sales Metrics
- August 30, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Suppose a company reports that its win rate is 24%. Does that tell you anything other than they suck? It doesn’t tell us how badly they suck, why they suck, how long they’ve sucked, who sucks, or whether there is any hope for them to stop sucking. And even if their win rate is double the 24%, the same questions apply. Let me explain.