Top Sales Leadership - resources for sales leaders

Dave Kurlan

The Challenger Style and its Impact on Sales Selection

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This White Paper responds to this article, which appeared on the Harvard Business Review Blog. The HBR article introduced a new selling style called the Challenger: It categorizes salespeople into 1 of 5 styles. It concludes that salespeople who belong to the “Challenger” style dramatically outperform relationship builders. I agree with the overall premise but… Read More

The Modern Science Behind Sales Force Excellence

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The Modern Science Behind Sales Force Excellence provides  insights, commentary and  conclusions reached from our Sales Force Effectiveness Study, conducted during the latter part of 2014. We will report on the practices of companies large and small, with and without dedicated top of the funnel teams, and with and without traditional sales forces. The study was… Read More

THE MODERN SCIENCE OF SALESPERSON SELECTION

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THE MODERN SCIENCE OF SALESPERSON SELECTION For more than 40 years, companies have been attempting to find a more accurate way to select salespeople who will succeed and, at the same time, reduce turnover in their sales organizations. In 1964, Harvard Business Review published “What Makes a Good Salesman”, an article by Herbert M. Greenberg… Read More

The Other Subject Nobody is Talking About

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When it comes to new salespeople, we often write about sourcing, assessments, applicant tracking, recruiting, selection and of course, getting it all right.  We also write about skills and Sales DNA and sales management coaching.  All of this is good and helpful but I don’t recall reading any articles that discuss new salesperson ramp-up! Even… Read More

The Qualification of Prospects – What is Really Happening Out There?

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This month we saw a significant increase in the number of articles written about ineffective sales qualification and ineffective sales management coaching.  It is the latter’s failure to assure that the former is doing what they are supposed to be doing. Everyone knows what qualifying is, but there are five inherent issues: Not everyone believes… Read More

The Science Of Predicting Sales Turnover

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Between 1985 and 2010, my continued research, assessments, studies and analyses of more than 500,000 salespeople and sales managers, has yielded consistent, predictive recommendations about the performance of salespeople. My White Paper, The Science of Salesperson Selection, discusses the research and methods employed over the past two decades to consistently improve and perfect the assessments… Read More

This Email Proves How Poorly the Bottom 74% of Salespeople Perform

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I’ve written more than 1,400 articles for Understanding the Sales Force and every one of them has been my observation of salespeople, sales managers and sales teams.  The observations come from sales force evaluations, sales candidate assessments, sales recruiting projects, sales training and coaching initiatives, and sales leadership training.  After 10 years and 1,400 articles and to avoid… Read More

Top 10 Rules for Successfully Building a Sales Culture

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More and more firms that aren’t traditionally sales-driven are finding it necessary to finally build more of a sales culture.  They know they need to do a better job at selling in order to deal with increasing competition, fewer call-ins, commoditization of their products and services, aging rainmakers looking at retirement, etc.  Management seems to… Read More