Dave Kurlan

Kurlan & Associates

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, the best-selling author of Baseline Selling, and a leading expert on Sales Force Development. He is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the leading developer of sales assessment tools. He is also the CEO of Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a leading sales force development firm.

Sales Leadership Challenges to Having a World Class Sales Force

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Posted on 2013-06-18

World-Class Sales Organization.

We hear those words a lot. Some companies aspire to it. Others claim to be there already. You are more likely to hear claims like those from a large enterprise, but you have better odds of actually finding it in a small to midsize company.

World-Class Sales Organization.

Some would say it's a description of a company's people. Others would suggest it has more to do with results. Many would say it's about the size of the sales force. And a few would point to sales leadership and discipline.

World-Class Sales Organization.

The top team of sales strategists at my sales leadership consulting and training firm, Kurlan & Associates, set out to define what a world-class sales organization is and we developed this model.

...

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Personality Tests, Sales Candidate Selection - How Tests Measure Up

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Posted on 2013-06-17

A recent article in Columbus Business First discussed background checks and use of personality tests. The most important line in the article read, "Personality often is the best insight into whether a person is a good cultural fit for a specific company."

Notice that they didn't say that personality is the best insight into whether a person will succeed in sales. That's because it isn't. Never was. Never will be.

Despite that, article after article points to the advantage of personality tests as a sales pre-employment tool. And most personality assessments now claim to be able...

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Baseball and Selling Revisited - A Powerful Analogy

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Posted on 2013-06-12

How many times has this happened to you?

A salesperson tells you about a great-looking opportunity that has been forecast to close this month. "We're definitely getting this and it's an awesome opportunity for us. We're going to knock this one out of the park!"

At the end of the month, the deal hasn't closed and you question your salesperson about it. You are told that the decision-maker has been away on vacation, but as soon as he returns, the deal is sure to get done.

A month later, nothing has changed. This time, the salesperson admits that he has had a little difficulty reaching the decision-maker, but he is sure that nothing has changed. You are assured that everything is good.

Six months later, when the deal still hasn't closed, you force the salesperson to archive the opportunity with the salesperson still not understanding what went wrong.

The exact same thing happens in baseball - especially with Little Leaguers. ...

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Sales Leadership Observations about Pipeline and Terminations

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Posted on 2013-06-02

The Pipeline, The Funnel and the Inaccurate Forecast - It gets a bit scary when people who are experts in one thing write about another. Today's example was sent to me by OMG partner Mike Shannon. He sent along a recent BtoBonline.com post by Jeff Perkins. Jeff suggests that the sales funnel is a thing of the past but his examples, and therefore reasons, are way off base. He seems confused about what the sales pipeline or funnel is supposed to do for us.

His examples are that people change their minds about what they will buy and/or take varying amounts...

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Inc Magazine Gets it Wrong on Sales Prospecting

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Posted on 2013-05-30

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan
I have to question Geoffrey James for an article he recently posted on Inc. Magazine's online site.

He opens the article by saying that for most companies "the ability to find potential customers is the difference between growth and bankruptcy." His opening might be a bit of an exaggeration. The reality is that it could be the difference between growth and lack of growth because most companies that aren't growing aren't going bankrupt.

In his article he shares a systematic approach for prospecting "loosely based upon a conversation with Thomas Ray Crowel...

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Sabermetrics for Sales Leadership - Projecting Sales Revenue

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Posted on 2013-05-29

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan
What if there was a way to project sales success even more so than what Objective Management Group has mastered during the past 23 years?

What if we could do what Bill James and a bunch of sabermaticians have done in Baseball?

Not that long ago, baseball hitting statistics were limited to batting average (AVE), Runs Batted In (RBI) and Home Runs (HR). Pitching statistics used to be limited to Wins (W), Losses (L) and Earned Run Average (ERA).

Today, the sabermaticians have developed statistics that better identify the value of a ball player and some of them, like On Base Percentage (OBP) and On Base Plus Slugging (OPS) have worked their way into...

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Everyone Can Sell. Not Really. Top 10 Reasons Why Not

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Posted on 2013-05-22

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave Kurlan
Dan Pink, Author of To Sell is Human, has been getting a lot of well deserved exposure. He wrote a terrific book and most who have read it really like it. I don't have a problem with his book because read in its entirety, it makes sense. I do have an issue with the people who write about his book and take the concept, that everyone can sell, out of context. The context is that everyone can sell their ideas. Agreed. But out of context, it is suggested that everyone can be a salesperson. I strongly...

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Salespeople Must Stop Snorkeling and Start Scuba Diving

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Posted on 2013-05-15

We talk a lot about the importance of using a Consultative approach instead of a transactional approach to better differentiate and sell value instead of price. When we explain Consultative selling we usually emphasize the importance of listening and questioning. When we further explain effective listening and questioning it becomes much more difficult to describe in a paragraph or in the absence of a demonstration or role play.

Until today.

Snorkeling, or moving along the surface of the ocean, is akin to poor questioning, moving from fish to fish or question to question, never finding anything of significance and only seeing that which is near the surface.

Scuba diving, or doing a deep dive, is akin to good, tough, timely questions that lead to the buried treasure of selling - a prospect's compelling reason to buy from you. When you scuba dive you explore a single site, but when you snorkel you go sight-seeing, continue traveling without really stopping to...

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Impact of Sales Process versus Sales Coaching

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Posted on 2013-05-14

Understanding the Sales Force by Dave KurlanWe are in the middle of the first day of our 2-day Sales Leadership Intensive. While most attendees admit that they must be more effective at coaching, many who said they have some kind of sales process in place didn't come to the same conclusion. So, why is it so obvious to sales leaders that they need to improve their coaching, but so elusive that they need to improve their sales process? The answer is feedback. You get instant feedback from coaching. Your coaching either makes a profound difference - right here and now - and leads to an otherwise unobtainable sale; or it makes no difference, falls on deaf ears, gets an insincere thank you, and causes a salesperson to avoid future coaching. Of course, there is an in-between area where coaching is sometimes effective, or moderately effective, but even that provides feedback. With sales process, the...

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Top 10 Reasons Why Salespeople Let Price Drive the Sale

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Posted on 2013-05-10
What comes so easily to the top 6% and some of the top 26% is so very difficult for others.

Most of your salespeople have very little capability to build value in the first place. Talking about what your company does better or differently is not building value. Telling a prospect what your value proposition is, does not build value. Value comes from 3 things:
1. Uncovering the compelling reason(s) to buy and buy from you,
2. Understanding the impact, ripple effect and cost of those compelling reasons, and
3. Positioning yourself and company as the clear choice to help with numbers one and two. Now the salesperson is the added value.
Here are a few random thoughts accumulated through the combined efforts of evaluating more than 650,000 salespeople and training tens of thousands of others. In no particular order:
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