(This article originally appeared on Dave Kurlan’s blog) Your kids won’t eat their vegetables, your parents won’t listen to you, your suppliers won’t provide customer service excellence, the President (as of 10-22-2012) of the United States can’t get the economy going, your football team isn’t winning enough games and the majority of your salespeople are… Read More
About Dave Kurlan
10 Sales Coaching Examples
Consider these nuances when it comes to some of the individuals whom I coach: TG needs to talk for the first 20 minutes before I can provide 10 minutes of powerful coaching. DD wants only one question answered in each session and wants to get off the phone ASAP. KY needs just one takeaway to… Read More
10 Selling Scenarios When You Must Slow Down
By now, surely everyone has written their Super Bowl articles, drawing inspiration from the game, the comeback and the records to make their points. In my business, it’s rare when someone isn’t an optimist but I’m a realist and the realist in me kept saying how improbable it would be – even for Tom Brady and… Read More
10 Types of Sales Advisers and How to Choose the One That’s Best For You
I’ll bet you know plenty about agreements, contracts, and legal compliance in your industry. You probably know enough about accounting, taxes and audits to get by too. And I bet you know your way around insurance, investments and real estate. Despite all of that knowledge, I’m certain you have a great corporate attorney, corporate accountant, insurance… Read More
11 Ways You Can Quickly Increase Sales, Revenue and Profit
Verne Harnish is the President of Gazelles – the coaching organization that helps fast growth companies. In addition to his best-selling books,Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and his latest, Scaling Up, he writes the Weekly Insights, which I always read from top to bottom. In his June 30 insights, Verne included a quote from Greg Brenneman, author of Right Away and All at Once –… Read More
13 Most Important Tools for Coaching Salespeople
This is the 1st in the series of the Top 10 Kurlan Sales Management Functions. #1 – COACHING In its simplest form, sales coaching consists of the following two activities: Pre-Call Strategizing – coaching prior to selected calls to make sure that the salesperson has a good reason for having the upcoming call, a desired… Read More
A CEO’s Guide to the Differences in Sales Leadership Roles
I was reviewing a sales leadership evaluation with my client, a CEO, who was a bit confused over how this was different from a sales management evaluation. He wondered, “Aren’t sales managers and sales leaders the same?” He has a sales force that was typical of a mid-size business with a Sales VP (the sales leader),… Read More
Achieve More Accurate Forecasts and Sales Results Today
Are you old enough so that if you don’t write something on your to-do list you won’t remember to do it? That’s me. I don’t feel old, I don’t look that old, but I’ll be 60 next year and I have become a slave to Wunderlist. On Monday, I forgot to push the correct notification button and… Read More
After Inbound 14 – Anatomy of a Hybrid Sales & Marketing Role
Last week, when speaking on the Inbound Stage at Inbound14, my topic was Hiring for the Inbound Sales Role. I asked the question, “Is this a sales or a marketing role?” The audience desperately wanted this to be a hybrid – someone who could do both the marketing and the sales. Unfortunately, a hybrid role… Read More
Are Inside Sales and Consultative Selling Mutually Exclusive?
I don’t write about Inside Sales as often as I should. After all, everyone else is writing about it, some bloggers are devoted to it, and if you read what the inside sales bloggers are writing you would think that inside sales is king. Of course, it is the king of the top of the… Read More
Are Sales and Sales Management Candidates Getting Worse?
There are more sales experts, self-professed and otherwise, than ever before. There is more free content on sales and selling than anyone could have imagined. There are probably twice as many books on the subject than just 10 years ago. There are categories of sales tools and CRM applications where none existed a few years… Read More
Are Salespeople Also Joggers?
As I drove to work today, I passed 4 joggers, all with different styles, paces and appearances. As usual, I saw the similarities between what I observed and the sales profession. Jogger #1 was an overweight man, in his 50’s, working very hard, but not going very fast or far. He had lots of unnecessary motion… Read More
Are You Using Artificial Intelligence to Generate New Opportunities?
Do you have Rainbow flatware? Biomagnetic ear stickers? A diamond-shaped ice cube tray? Baby feather wings? Believe it or not, these things actually exist. You don’t believe it? Have you signed up to use a company that uses AI to generate leads for you? You haven’t? Me neither. It seems to me that the only… Read More
Bigger Sales Pipelines – The Dangerous Truth
I usually get notified when new sales studies are published and I’m asked to link to those reports from my Blog. Recently, I was invited to download the 2016 InsideSales.com Business Growth Index Report. I read through it and while I wasn’t terribly surprised by anything, there were a few findings that are quite interesting, showing that some companies aren’t… Read More
Bringing a Sales Opportunity Back From the Dead
I’ve provided examples before of bringing seemingly lost opportunities back from the dead. That may be the reason a client asked me to help bring one of his company’s deals back from what might be a near death experience. I’m not going to reveal the details of this opportunity (yet) but opportunities like this usually… Read More
Can These 5 Keys Determine the Fate of Cold Calling?
The May issue of Top Sales Magazine is now available and in addition to my monthly article, this month’s issue is loaded with important reading on sales and selling. Bob Terson posted my article, Are Your Salespeople Still Cold Calling – The Ugly Truth over at the Selling Fearlessly Blog. When marketers and writers tell… Read More
Case History – How Sales Reps Went from Losing to Winning
Last month, I showed 65 reps, in one company, how to make the transition from a transactional, relationship-based approach, to a consultative approach to selling. It was eye-opening, dramatic and controversial. There was discomfort, resistance and fear. They observed how a consultative conversation sounds completely different from a transactional or relationship-based conversation. And they observed… Read More
Case Study – Which Sales Approach is Really More Effective?
I haven’t been completely transparent in some of my recent articles. I have continued to urge readers how important it is to sell using a consultative, buyer-focused methodology and a formal, structured sales process. This helps to shorten the sales cycle, increase closing percentages and most importantly, differentiate, allowing you to sell value instead… Read More
Consistency, Not Heroics Drives Revenue
I see this every month – perhaps you do too… With about seven days to go, sales managers can’t schedule a meeting and won’t come to the phone. They suspend coaching their salespeople and holding them accountable because something much more important is taking place. Understand that this is crunch time – they are down… Read More
Consultative Selling: What You Think versus What I Think
Most salespeople believe that consultative selling involves asking questions prior to presenting solutions. They would be right, but only if they also believe that software programming is one’s ability to configure email accounts on multiple devices. We do a tremendous amount of role-playing when we train and coach salespeople and sales leaders. The main purpose… Read More
Do Salespeople Leverage the Ideal Moment in the Buying Process?
This winter in the northeastern USA, we had been getting hammered with snowstorm after snowstorm. This is what it looked like as the sun was rising yesterday morning. It was perfect. A winter wonderland. The glow. White before it browns. And lots of it. This my friends, is what it feels like the morning after… Read More
Don’t Sell the Value – BE the Value!
You remember the 1980’s, don’t you? That’s when companies spent their time in conference rooms crafting catchy sounding value propositions. Back then, all one needed was to massage the message until it properly communicated value in a meaningful way. Then, salespeople were trained to present that value proposition whenever they were in front of a… Read More
Eliminating All the Noise
Many people in the USA have stopped watching the news. It’s non-stop, never-ending, 24×7 reporting on all things Trump. Regardless of whether you are Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, or a never-Trumper, lean to the left or lean to the right, I’m sure you’ll agree that there is hardly any other news… Read More
Finding the Right Sales and Sales Management Candidates
I read this terrific post from our friends at New-Hire.com about the best sources for candidates in general. It certainly applies to sales candidates as well. Not only are the best sources a moving target, but the candidates themselves can be looked at the same way. Five years ago, we may have started with Monster.com, two… Read More