It’s not the three minutes it will take to do this favor for you. Everyone has three minutes.

And it’s not even the noise and the wear and tear of the mental clutch as we shift from one task to another.

For me, and for many people, it’s the leakage of mental bandwidth.

Fear is the enemy of creativity and innovation and of starting things. The resistance hates those things—they are risky, they might not work, so the resistance pushes us not to do them.

Click here to read more on Seth Godin’s blog.

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

So you have your sales force evaluated and in addition to learning why you are getting the results you are getting, and what you can do to significantly improve those results, you are suprised by some of the individual findings on some of your salespeople. One of the findings that generates the most push-back is Lack of Commitment to sales success.

We could hear any of the following comments as push-back to this finding:

• our best salesperson,
• nobody tries harder,
• works longer hours than anyone,

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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

Selling value.

What comes so easily to the top 6% and some of the top 26% is so very difficult for others.

Most salespeople have little capability to effectively build value. Talking about what your company does better or differently or telling a prospect what your value proposition is does not build value. Instead, 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. Then the salesperson becomes 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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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

We 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?

Change occurs in direct proportion to the availability of immediate feedback.

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Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, sales thought leader and highly regarded sales development expert.

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.

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