Dave Kurlan

Over the years you have worked with many salespeople and often times their success, or lack thereof, didn't correlate as much to their skills as it did to their Desire or Motivation for sales success. Desire is how badly one wants to succeed, and Motivation is what drives them to success.  I've written many articles about Sales Motivation but let's take a slightly different path today.

What is actually behind sales motivation?

I'll skip over Intrinsic motivation (pride, mastery, satisfaction, recognition, love of the work) and go straight to extrinsic motivation (...

Chris Scirpoli, of Invoke Selling, managed to engage me for nearly 15 minutes in a power-packed, fast-paced, video interview that covered a tremendous amount of ground in a very short period of time.  He did the mandatory, "tell me about your background", but he left nearly 13 minutes for me to elaborate on the greatest challenges to sales managers and salespeople and the various approaches that can be implemented to solve these challenges.  Because of the questions he asked, it was one of the better interviews with regard to content.  You can watch the interview here.  If you liked that, you'll really like the...

Many of the Sales Force Evaluations provided by Objective Management Group (OMG) reveal that the company's problems run so deep that they will require a complete sales force make over.  However, it doesn't always have to be that way. Sometimes, a single word, question or statement will change how every prospect responds.

In one such company, most of their opportunities were found via inbound calls.  As you might expect, the first question from each prospect had to do with pricing and availability.  Salespeople weren't able to answer the pricing question and continue to keep their callers on the phone.  Selling was very transactional and they had little control over outcomes.

By only modifying how they responded to the price question, they were able to take the first steps toward transitioning from a transactional sale to a consultative process.  They began having deeper and...

As part of its sales force evaluation process, Objective Management Group (OMG) conducts a pipeline analysis and determines both the quality of the pipeline and the quantity of the pipeline.  We ask each salesperson to submit 4 proposal-ready opportunities and then we run the analysis.

If we were reviewing a full pipeline instead of just 4 proposal-ready opportunities for each salesperson, an ideal sales pipeline would look like this:

Because we are only conducting the analysis on their proposal-ready opportunities, the pipeline should appear like this instead, with all of the opportunities showing up in either the completely-qualified or closable stages:

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