Building a High-Performance Sales Team with Dave Kurlan

[00:00:00] Welcome back to Flowing Sales. We are honored to have Dave Curlan on our podcast today. He

[00:00:09] is the author of a bestselling book. He is the author also of a industry renowned blog

[00:00:16] and runs his own company, Curlan & Associates, an all-around expert on sales, especially

[00:00:21] in the manufacturing space, manufacturing rep space. We'll have links to his blog

[00:00:26] and his book in the show notes, so be sure to check those out. But otherwise, we just

[00:00:30] wanted to welcome you onto the show and get going to talk about some sales tactics.

[00:00:35] Thanks so much for thinking of me, inviting me on the show. It's great to be here.

[00:00:39] Thank you. So the reason we initially invited Dave onto the show, we saw an article that he

[00:00:45] wrote about how to do more effective sales. It was called Do You Have Woodpeckers in

[00:00:51] Your Sales Organization talks about how hunters versus farmers, how that kind of relates, how

[00:00:56] that can help us, that sort of that paradigm, how that can help us be better sales professionals.

[00:01:00] So maybe we can just jump into kind of that topic and we'll go from there. Sounds good.

[00:01:05] So what would you say some advice you have hunters versus farmers is one better than

[00:01:10] the other? Should a salesperson be both? What do you think? You know it's changed over the years

[00:01:15] back in the day and I've been selling professionally since 1973 and I've been in

[00:01:20] the sales development business since 1986. So if we go back to the 80s, since I've been in this

[00:01:26] business, most sales organizations had sales people who did everything. You know, they

[00:01:32] ran opportunities from the cradle to the grave. They found them, they talked to them,

[00:01:37] they closed them and they serviced them. And then over the years, especially after the

[00:01:42] turn of the century, we started to see a lot more specialization. You know with BDRs,

[00:01:48] SERs, account executives and account managers, key logo folks, we have national accounts and

[00:01:54] major accounts. And I think some specialization is good because not everybody has the skills to

[00:02:00] do everything. So there are a lot of sales people who will not hunt ever, no matter what,

[00:02:08] it's not in their DNA. So they need to be in an account management role. They need to be farming.

[00:02:14] And there are a lot of sales people who only want to hunt. I mean, they love the thrill of the kill

[00:02:21] and finding and closing opportunities but don't want to be bogged down managing those customers

[00:02:27] and clients. So they absolutely should be in a hunting role. But that BDR role that was brought

[00:02:34] in by mostly software as a service, SaaS companies, they decided that they shouldn't

[00:02:41] be wasting their account managers precious time by having them engage in prospecting. So they brought

[00:02:47] in teams of business development reps who would do outbound and schedule first meetings. And I

[00:02:55] hate that. I mean, it's all over the place. It's probably not going to get out, get

[00:03:00] blown up at this point, but I think it should be blown up. You've got the most difficult part

[00:03:05] of any sales cycle is reaching out, getting a decision maker on the phone and scheduling the

[00:03:12] first meeting. Even the best sales people on the planet will say that's the hardest part because

[00:03:18] once they're in front of somebody, they've got a little bit of control over how it goes from there.

[00:03:23] Yet what have these brilliant company executives done? They've taken the youngest, most inexperienced

[00:03:30] sales people on the planet right out of school and they put them in the job doing the most difficult

[00:03:37] thing in the world, reaching out to decision makers and trying to schedule a first meeting.

[00:03:41] And they're incentivized by how many first meetings they book. Now a couple of things,

[00:03:45] they suck at it. They book an average of one and a half meetings a week. That's pretty freaking

[00:03:50] bad. And number two, they don't book meetings that I would call quality meetings. So now

[00:03:56] you're wasting A's time following up on crappy meetings that were set. Now I've been selling

[00:04:02] since 1973, like I mentioned at the beginning of your show. There's no way I want some kids

[00:04:08] scheduling my meetings for me. I even at 68 years old and with all this experience,

[00:04:14] I would prefer to make a cold reach out myself if it came to that, to book my own meetings

[00:04:20] then follow up on a meeting that a 23 year old right out of college just booked for me.

[00:04:25] Other than that, I don't have an opinion. Well, if you had the youngest people performing the

[00:04:32] prospecting piece, which is the hardest part like Dave said, sometimes you've run the risk of running

[00:04:37] some probably talented farmers, you know, account managers off because you're putting them in a

[00:04:42] place they don't want to do it. They're not very good at it. But you know what? These folks

[00:04:46] might be, you know, A players from the standpoint of being an account manager. Do

[00:04:51] you see that from time to time or across the industry? Yeah, you know, the biggest problem.

[00:04:56] We evaluate a lot of sales teams before we start working with them, before we do training and

[00:05:01] coaching and consulting. We do a sales team evaluation so that we can figure out what

[00:05:06] they got, what their capabilities are in 21 sales core competencies, what their potential is,

[00:05:12] where they need help. And one of the things that's most evident is that the sales leaders

[00:05:18] don't have any clue what their sales people's capabilities are, because the only thing they're

[00:05:22] doing is looking at the numbers, that the dollar numbers, the revenue, and you can't rank

[00:05:28] salespeople or determine capabilities based on revenue because your account managers who have

[00:05:35] the best accounts are going to have the highest revenue. But it doesn't mean that they're

[00:05:39] the best salespeople. They're just responsible for managing the most revenue. So from sales leadership

[00:05:46] on up, they miscalculate and mislabel who their producers are. And that's the shame because without

[00:05:56] knowing who's really good at growing the company as opposed to who's really good at managing revenue,

[00:06:03] it's impossible to strategize properly and optimize a sales organization so that the

[00:06:09] right people are in the right roles doing the right things for the right reasons.

[00:06:13] How do you go about measuring that? Is that more, like you say, you do an assessment and it's more

[00:06:19] kind of personality based or are there other mechanisms? Yeah, we don't look at personality

[00:06:24] at all since personality types aren't correlated to any kind of sales output or performance or

[00:06:31] success. We use OMG objective management groups, sales team evaluation, and that measures sales

[00:06:39] people in 21 sales core competencies. And as an aside, I founded OMG in 1990. I was the CEO until 2022.

[00:06:50] I was a senior advisor there until my exit in 2023 and it is head and shoulders way above any

[00:06:58] other assessment on the market because it's sales specific and it just measures sales

[00:07:02] competencies, not personalities and not behaviors and not cognitive abilities but

[00:07:08] sales capabilities. And once we're measuring sales capabilities and sales competencies,

[00:07:14] then we can much more easily see who should be in which role and what kind of gaps they have in their

[00:07:22] skill sets and what kind of training and coaching they need to get. Do you find that

[00:07:27] once you do this assessment and figure out kind of where people should be, do you try to

[00:07:32] train? I'm assuming you have them focus on their strengths and then train more of those strengths

[00:07:38] as opposed to, hey, this person needs to do multiple things. Let's try to train them on everything

[00:07:43] but maybe not. How broad of the skill set should somebody have versus like let's get them really

[00:07:49] good at a specific thing? That's a fantastic question. So to answer that so that it makes

[00:07:54] sense, need to understand a little about what it's measuring. So there's three major categories

[00:08:02] that that assessment looks at. The first is will to sell or grit or heart and soul. It's

[00:08:10] commitment, how committed they are to achieving greater sales success. It's desire, how bad

[00:08:16] they want it. It's motivation, what's behind that desire. It's their outlook and it's whether

[00:08:22] they take responsibility for their results. So that's one category. You can't train that

[00:08:28] category. That's either where it needs to be or it's an indicator that they're probably not going

[00:08:34] to change because it's not important enough to them. The second category is sales DNA. That's

[00:08:39] the collection of strengths that will support sales process, sales methodology, sales strategy,

[00:08:46] sales tactics and sales DNA is hard to train. You can make sales people aware of how their

[00:08:55] sales DNA impacts their results in the field and on the phone, but it can really only be improved

[00:09:02] through coaching. And then the third category is the stuff that you'd be familiar with. It's

[00:09:06] 10 tactical selling competencies like hunting, reaching decision makers, building relationships,

[00:09:14] taking a consultative approach, selling value, their approach to presentations,

[00:09:20] whether they're presenting the right ideas to the right people at the right time for the right

[00:09:25] reasons, their ability to close their ability to use sales process and their ability to use

[00:09:31] sales technology. So that first category will do sell. That tells us whether they're going to get

[00:09:37] any better or not. The second category tells us what's in the way and why they may be struggling.

[00:09:43] And the third category gives us the specific skill sets and allows us to hone in on

[00:09:49] where they need help through training and coaching. How big of an impact does an assessment

[00:09:54] like that? Do you have any, it'd be great to hear maybe a story or an example of where you applied

[00:09:59] this and all of a sudden, oh, well let's move this person here, let's move that person there.

[00:10:02] Like how fast of an impact can an assessment like that make in an organization? I'll share

[00:10:08] one of those stories. And for context, OMG has assessed two and a half million sales people.

[00:10:13] So we're not talking about some tiny little data set. So one example was a technology company and

[00:10:20] when I talked to them, they had been flat for four years, no growth in some of their territories.

[00:10:28] They had 100% turnover and they originally reached out because they wanted to assess sales

[00:10:34] candidates. And I said, you know, that's fine. But if you've got 100% turnover and flat sales,

[00:10:43] assessing your sales candidates isn't going to fix that problem. That'll help on sales selection.

[00:10:49] But first, you need to understand why you've got 100% turnover and why the sales people

[00:10:54] you're hiring or have hired aren't growing revenue. So we did the sales team evaluation and the

[00:11:00] there were three things that were really evident from the sales team evaluation.

[00:11:05] Big picture. Number one is that their sales management team sucked. It was as bad as any

[00:11:13] that I had ever seen. They weren't doing any coaching, they weren't holding salespeople accountable

[00:11:19] and they didn't even want to be sales managers. So they had to be replaced. The second problem was

[00:11:26] it appeared that they were hiring sales people out of a major long time competitor.

[00:11:33] So they were in data storage, but they were hiring salespeople from EMC and Sun who had sold

[00:11:41] data storage. But those salespeople were used to having the red carpet rolled out.

[00:11:47] They were from the big players. They could get in any time. Their companies would buy the

[00:11:51] business if they had to and discount the business to win it. And now they go to a new

[00:11:57] company with a new technology that nobody's ever heard of and they don't know how to overcome

[00:12:01] resistance. So they were hiring the wrong salespeople. And then the third problem was that they were

[00:12:08] completely lacking sales process and the salespeople that they had were pretty much

[00:12:15] sucky because not only had they been hired from the companies where it was easy to sell,

[00:12:22] they didn't have any selling ability. They were just living off the company's name and

[00:12:27] resources. So the first thing we did was with the CEO's permission, we hired them six

[00:12:34] new sales managers to lead the team. We trained up and coached up the sales managers so that

[00:12:40] they could coach effectively. And then we showed the sales managers how to hire the right salespeople

[00:12:46] using the OMG candidate assessment. And the result of that story, which was too long to tell,

[00:12:53] was that they went from completely flat sales of 24 million for four straight years and they

[00:13:00] doubled sales inside of 12 months even with all the changes that we were making.

[00:13:04] That's wild. And then the interesting twist to the story, one of the board members was Larry

[00:13:10] Ellison who owns Oracle and he decided to buy them. He was so excited about the growth

[00:13:18] they achieved in that 12 months. He bought them and we lost the client because we did such a good

[00:13:24] job. You lost the acquisition because you did too good of a job. You got to turn it down a little bit.

[00:13:33] That's right. That's exactly what happened. That's wild. I mean, because that's something

[00:13:38] that I think a lot of times people maybe don't even realize, right? You can't see. I mean,

[00:13:43] maybe there's indicators or there's flags like, hey, this person isn't where they're supposed

[00:13:46] to be. But for the most part are the things you're talking about more or less invisible or what should

[00:13:53] someone be looking for to know they have an issue, right? Where I need to revamp this.

[00:13:57] Yeah, they're invisible. They're exactly because sales leadership and the C-suite is so invested

[00:14:05] in the dollar amount. That's all they see. Well, this is our best salesperson because he

[00:14:09] leads the team with $7 million a year in revenue. This is our worst salesperson because

[00:14:14] he's only generating 750,000 a year in revenue. But it could be that the person managing $7

[00:14:22] million in revenue is just living off his past, inherited that $7 million worth of accounts,

[00:14:29] is in the best territory that the company has, hasn't grown the business at any's worth.

[00:14:37] And it's possible that $750,000 salesperson is brand new, brought in all that business

[00:14:43] from scratch in the first year and is doing more than anybody else to grow the business.

[00:14:47] So when you start looking at the factors that aren't revenue, if you start looking at the factors

[00:14:54] that revolve around what it takes to grow the company, what it takes to bring in new accounts,

[00:15:00] what it takes to grow existing accounts, then it totally reorders your perspective on who's

[00:15:07] really valuable to the company and who isn't. And then of course the sales team evaluation

[00:15:12] further enhances that with a look into who's going to get better, how much better can they get,

[00:15:18] how long will it take, what do you have to do with them. And then you've got the complete picture.

[00:15:23] And of course sales management is always a part of that equation. Sometimes it's the key part

[00:15:29] like it was with the example I gave you. Sometimes it's a contributing factor but

[00:15:33] they always play a part. How would people get started thinking about this? I mean I know

[00:15:39] they can, aside from taking the entire assessment, are there early steps that you can take to start

[00:15:45] and assess your sales team? There are three things that companies can do. I can email you some links

[00:15:51] that you can include in your show notes but OMG has one tool where you can have your sales

[00:15:58] people take an assessment and you can look at how they compare to your industry to business

[00:16:05] in general and you can see the results aggregately. You won't get any individual reports or reporting

[00:16:12] on the team or the people for free. You can make a purchase to get that information but you can at

[00:16:19] least get started for free. Is there anything in, I mean you've done lots of these assessments

[00:16:23] right and seen a lot of things. Is there any pattern or trends that you've seen in I don't

[00:16:30] know skills or grit like you're saying that you most commonly see people have misaligned?

[00:16:36] Yeah I think right now the three things that we're seeing most is that number one sales people aren't

[00:16:45] getting to decision makers and statistically we know that sales people who get to decision makers

[00:16:52] early in the sales process are 341 percent more likely to get the business so that's huge.

[00:16:59] Number two because they're not getting to decision makers it's harder for them to take a

[00:17:05] consultative approach because the folks lower in the organization were just tasked to get information

[00:17:11] don't want to have that kind of a conversation because they're not having a or taking a

[00:17:16] consultative approach and being effective during discovery they're not really uncovering any

[00:17:22] compelling reasons to buy it and to buy from them therefore there's no urgency and without any of

[00:17:30] those elements it makes it really difficult for them to sell value because the value comes from

[00:17:36] uncovering their compelling reasons to buy and from a decision maker who's the only one who

[00:17:43] can really articulate what the value would be so those three things followed by probably

[00:17:49] not following sales process effectively or the process being ineffective at the company are the

[00:17:56] things that I'm seeing most frequently right now and if you add a layer to that sales people

[00:18:02] sales managers not coaching and when they do coach not doing it the right way would be

[00:18:07] the fourth thing that I see the most of. You mentioned not not getting to decision makers

[00:18:12] what is the biggest impediment there in today's marketplace like why aren't they getting

[00:18:17] to decision makers what can they do to improve that there's a couple of things decision makers are

[00:18:22] being insulated so they're harder to reach but that said a lot of sales people think that as

[00:18:29] long as they're talking to somebody who's enthusiastic that's enough because they're

[00:18:34] not comfortable either going around that person asking that person to get the decision maker

[00:18:39] engaged or they don't believe it's necessary to be talking with the decision maker it's not

[00:18:45] a milestone in the sales process that they need to be talking to a decision maker they think this

[00:18:50] person will get the job done for them maybe this person lied about their decision making ability

[00:18:55] but it's just not taken seriously enough. Okay interesting I know we're coming up on time I know

[00:19:02] your time is valuable so Craig did you have any additional? I think you made a good point about

[00:19:07] the decision making we see a lot of sales people in the industry that they get comfortable

[00:19:13] with the relationship with a particular person and I think that's a hurdle to get over and Dave

[00:19:19] touched on that where they're not willing to ask the question hey can we get so-and-so involved

[00:19:26] in this because you know they're the ones that are going to ultimately sign off on it or are

[00:19:32] there ways to keep the relationship and still be able to involve that person that will

[00:19:39] ultimately decide if they go this way or this way so I think that that's something that we can do

[00:19:47] better as a company is not just stopping with our in our comfort zone is get out of the comfort zone

[00:19:53] make sure we're engaging the right people and you don't have to go around anybody I think it's

[00:19:57] just a matter of how you do it and then you can actually use that person who you're dealing

[00:20:02] with on a day-to-day basis and bring those others in so you're dealing with the right team in most

[00:20:09] cases to get the decision that you ultimately want. I agree with that and there's two things I can

[00:20:15] close with one let's take the sales person who does get to the decision maker and has a conversation

[00:20:22] with a decision maker and the folks who are tasked to gather information and proposals and

[00:20:28] quotes they go to the decision maker and they say so we narrowed it down to these three suppliers

[00:20:34] ABC company XYZ company and LMO company and the decision maker looks at it and says oh I met the

[00:20:42] guy from LMO let's go with that but it's a known the other thing is if sales people are having

[00:20:52] a good discovery conversation and they can uncover a compelling reason to buy they can

[00:20:57] ask a question like well who else cares about this and that's a non-threatening way of finding out

[00:21:04] who the decision maker is and it's done earlier in the sales process so it's not done at the

[00:21:11] milestone where you have to get to the decision maker so it's way before a dumb sales person would

[00:21:18] ask a dumb question like so who's the decision maker just who else cares about this we'll

[00:21:24] get you an honest well bob cares about this well who's bob that's my boss who else cares about it

[00:21:29] charlie cares about this who's charlie he's our ceo said well i'm sure they have some opinions about

[00:21:37] what would be an ideal situation and how the problem you described is affecting them

[00:21:42] is there a time we can get them involved in the discussion it's so much more effective

[00:21:47] and conversational than can you tell me who the decision maker is yeah because we're seeing a

[00:21:53] lot of times these days it's decision by committee and it's even that much more important than just

[00:21:59] getting to a decision maker because in most cases those are multiple people and they're

[00:22:04] representing the specific wants and needs of a group within your customer so you got to be able to

[00:22:13] work with the people that you work with every day but then also be able to branch out and get to

[00:22:18] those people that will ultimately end up on the committee and make these decisions so it's that much

[00:22:24] more important like i think david that was a great question to ask is like who else is this

[00:22:29] important to and then you're able to get to them ask the right questions and you kind of start

[00:22:35] to formulate your plan to address those needs of this group or that group and then hopefully

[00:22:43] end up getting the committee to decide with with your solution and i promised that on the day you

[00:22:49] get to present to the committee if there's four or six or eight people sitting around the table

[00:22:55] that's not the day where they decide who's going to get the business they already know at that

[00:23:00] point and if you've individually met with each of those people then it's much more likely to

[00:23:05] be you on that day the lines are already drawn in the sand minds are made up decisions have been

[00:23:13] formed and all you can do is screw it up no pressure yeah exactly well david we appreciate

[00:23:21] you the time coming on and joining joining us thanks for inviting me i enjoyed the conversation

[00:23:27] cool all right um what's the best way people can can work with you or reach out if they want

[00:23:31] to continue the kind of circle uh reach out by email and i'm sure you'll include that in the show notes

[00:23:37] right yep we'll put it in there yeah we'll do it all right all right well thank you so much

[00:23:42] dav we appreciate it thanks dad thanks for having me we'll do