Predicting Sales Success with Assessments - Dave Kurlan - Objective Management Group

Hey, everybody, it's Jim Johnson here, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro, with this week's episode of Contractor Radio. And I get excited about all of our guests, but today's guest ranks way up there in my historical list of guests. This guy is pretty much a mentor. He doesn't even know that yet, but I've watched a lot of his stuff. I've been on his mailing list forever and actually believe in him so much that we got on board with their assessment process. And he has been a keynote speaker for Inc. Magazine, Marketing and Sales Success magazine. He is a founder of OMG Objective Management Group, also the founder of Kurland and Associates, author of Star, which is all about assessing and evaluating talent, as well as baseline selling. Like, if you haven't gotten a book yet about sales, you gotta go get baseline selling. Fantastic book. And he was also inducted into the Sales and Marketing hall of Fame, which I didn't even know there was such a thing. But I really wanted to find out more about how to get into that. Like, I want to get into that someday. So today I want to. Welcome aboard. Dave Curlin. Welcome. Good to have you.

Thanks, Jim. Thanks for thinking of me and inviting me to your podcast.

Yeah, you really have been a hero of mine for the last several years. I kind of found out about you, I don't know, six or seven years ago.

Well, I don't own a cape, so I can't be a hero. But. But I can be another cool friend if you want.

Well, cool. I like that. I'm good with cool friends. This whole sales thing has been a passion of mine since I was pretty young. I've been to all of it. You know, you name them, I've been to their events. And so to see a guy like you that really takes it kind of from a philosophical and practical point of view is. It's pretty interesting to me because I don't know if people think. Think depth wise, they tend to get the surface level of stuff and then try to apply, but they don't think about the psychology and the traits and talents and all the skills that go along with it quite as deep as they should.

A lot like the iceberg, you know, where you see the tip of the iceberg sticking out of the water, but it's what's under the water that has all the meat and the guts and makes that iceberg so stable.

Oh, yeah, it's really years of gathering knowledge, years of making it, practice using it quite often, and then you get that experience. It seems like that you get more comfortable with what you're talking about. So before we get into all that fun conversations, kind of tell us the path, like, I don't know, the history and background of how you got to this. Omg. And also with the Curling Associates, what got you there?

Well, we have to go back to 1973.

I was 4.

I was 18, and I had just basically flunked out of college and I needed something to do. So I took a job selling knives, Cutco knives, which is what most college kids took a job doing for a week. Literally, the average tenure of a Cutco knife salesperson was a week. If you were local to where your parents lived, you went through their friends and you went through your friends and you were done. And if, and if you were living away from home at college, you do this for like three days and realize that you couldn't cold call. It just wasn't in your blood to do this and you quit. I lasted three years. I went through all my parents, friends and relatives in three weeks. Three weeks. I didn't have any friends, so no more weeks for that. And then I just transitioned into the cold calling. And I was a huge introvert, anti social, just hated people. But I managed to do it. And so I got promoted because, you know, with 99.9% turnover, there aren't a whole lot of people that have been around longer than me. So I got promoted three times. And pretty soon, at 19 years old, I'm managing a sales organization. And couple things, my salespeople weren't turning over. I was keeping them and I was having fun. And I made a decision at 19 years old that I would love to be in a business where I could coach and train salespeople. But I was kind of inexperienced and kind of young and I knew I needed to get some experience. So I set a goal of 30. So when I was 30, in 1985, I started Curlin and Associates. And as part of Curlin and Associates, we were doing sales training and sales coaching. And I started assessing people. I just had some questions on paper and collected their answers. I was a pretty good diagnostician. I could figure out what ailed them and what was getting in the way of their sales success. And pretty soon colleagues in the, in the sales development business found out I was doing this and wanted in. So started a separate company called Objective management group in 1990 just to do Salesforce evaluations. Candidate assessments came four years later. And basically it was built on the premise that behavioral scientists studied all the successful salespeople and we we'd read study after study that says we. We surveyed 1102 successful salespeople and they all had the following traits in common. And I just didn't get that because I was working with unsuccessful salespeople and they had the same traits. They were exactly the same. So my premise was, if, if it's not these traits that the behavioral scientists are saying that successful salespeople have, then what is it that differentiates them from the bottom feeders that I was trying to help? And you know, over a period of time in the late 80s, I discovered that there was the will to sell. That's desire and commitment and outlook and responsibility and motivation. There was sales DNA, which was whether or not they needed to be liked, whether or not they could control their emotions, how they bought things themselves, and whether that supported ideal sales outcomes, whether they were comfortable talking about money, what they thought up here, their beliefs, whether they were supportive or self limiting. And then there are their traditional sales competencies, things we know like whether they could hunt and whether they could close and whether they could qualify. And the original evaluation was built on being able to identify what those competency gaps were and what salespeople needed to do to improve. So that's the path to get there. And then it's been another 30 years. We just, OMG, just had its 30th birthday. So we've continued to evolve and improve and make the evaluation and the assessment better every single day.

Yeah, it's. It's unlike anything I've seen before because I was trying to figure out how do I, how do I do a better job of hiring salespeople? Because there's all kinds of books about it and there's all kinds of studies you talked about behavioral scientists. There's a lot of this concept of this. You gotta have talent to be able to do. Like there's got some inherent talents. If you don't have those, you're not going to be successful. Whereas all these different things I went through trying to figure out what is the best way to bring in and hire salespeople to save time to keep them in a position where they're going to be successful. We have this concept around here. We call it time to money. Like, the more a person has to learn as a skill, the longer it's going to be till they make money. So you got to be able to make.

And so what's the length of that Runway?

Yeah, like the longer.

What kind of a safety net do they have?

Yeah, safety net's important. The fact that if they're not making money. You're going to have a lot of high turnover. So I started looking into every assessment you could find. And you know, like Briggs Myers disc tests. And those are great, there's nothing wrong with them. Like, DISC is really good for communicating with certain personalities. Briggs Myers is really good at determining kind of who somebody is, but it doesn't tell you, like, will they be successful at sales? That's why I was the one that says you're going to either be successful or not.

Exactly. They're not predictive. I use DISC in my business. We use it for hiring all the roles in the company except for sales because it's accurate, it's good information, but it's not sales specific. And none of the behavioral or personality assessments. I mean, Myers Briggs is one of the oldest, most reliable assessments in the world. Hasn't changed since the 50s. And it measures 16 dimensions of personality compared to discs four. They're all, it's all great to know, but it doesn't tell you whether this person will succeed in this role at this company, in this industry, selling to these people, asking for this much money in a sales cycle that needs to be this long against that kind of competition. And so OMG is built to be able to give you that, says Crystal Ball. Will the salesperson successfully do that? And it's predictive in that our findings correlate to on the job performance. So it's not old, cool, fuzzy, neat stuff to know. And then you have to just make a guess, take a leap of faith. Because there is no kind of personality that's a sales personality. Everybody's different. So extroverted people don't do better at sales than introverted people. Introverted people do better at sales than extroverted people. Extroverted people love to talk and make friends. And that's the problem. They talk and make friends. Introverted people love to listen and ask questions, you know, so if you can teach an introverted person how to do some relationship building and build rapport, they already have within themselves the ability to be patient and listen and ask questions to find the compelling reason why they would do business with you. So it's all about, it's all about matching up the right person for the role and whether they have the, the appropriate sales DNA and selling competencies to succeed.

So I want to, I want to make sure I heard you correctly. You just told me that introverted people will be better salespeople than extroverted salespeople, which flies in the face of everything that anybody has ever said ever about sales. Could you dig into that a little bit deeper, why that is?

And what if I don't want to?

There's that introverted person.

Nobody is more introverted than me. And you're seeing me on this podcast, you know, Curlin, you're extroverted. No, I learned how to act like an extroverted person. I learned how to be animated and memorable and say things that'll get people's attention. I learned to talk with a smile on my face. I learned to be, you know, charismatic. I learned that. But you turn the camera off, turn off the microphone, and I'm gonna bury myself in. In personal work, I'm not looking for interactions, conversations, parties, social gatherings. This, this quarantine has been great for me. It's taken all the expectations of having to meet people away. I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to see anybody. I don't have to talk to anybody. So when I'm working, when I'm doing what they. What I do, I flip the switch and I go into either sales mode or delivery mode or consulting mode or coaching mode, whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing. But then I flip the switch off and I'm back to me, antisocial. I hate people. Remember that was the first thing I said.

Well, it's funny because we may become friends. After all, people don't know this about me. They think I'm an extrovert because I speak at a lot of events and I'm an outgoing, you know, in public type of person. And. But if you ask my wife, she'll be like, nah, he likes to be quiet, like he would rather just be on his own. And I like to get focused on stuff, dig in, learn, really spend some time there to understand things from a philosophical and diagnostic level. Because those things are what helped me with the skills, how to apply them.

Yeah, most people don't even know the difference between an introvert and extrovert. They think it's the stuff we're talking about. But the real difference is an extrovert gets energy from other people. An introvert expels energy from other people. For me, it's work to do. An hour with you right now will exhaust me because it's something that doesn't come naturally. Whereas if, if I sit down and start just doing some work, work on my computer by myself, me alone with my thoughts, I'll get my energy back.

That is exactly what it is. You know, you're energized by other People and then the introverts energized by time alone, like this time to kind of get back to center again. And I am that way after these events. I go and speak. I saw like, I'll die and just be exhausted for exactly hours till I can get some time to myself. There's a lot of people coming on here. They're like, agreed, yeah, that's really good. And there's. And I look at it over my history of hiring people, I probably hired over a thousand or more salespeople in my time as a leader. And the ones that actually turned out the best as far as full gamut salespeople from not just the being able to sell somebody say yes, but to follow it through, to execute, to deliver, to build those relationships and stick with it type of thing. I look back now and go, man, there was a lot of introverts in there. There's been some pretty good extroverts too. But you usually have to pick up the missing pieces after that. But it was messy afterwards.

Right? And this message is not go hire some introverts. And this message is not don't hire extroverts. The point of this message is it doesn't matter if they're good salespeople. It doesn't matter whether they're an extrovert or an introvert. And if they're crappy salespeople, it doesn't matter whether they're an introvert or an extrovert. You're just going to find them in both places. It's an example of why personality isn't predictive of sales success. Because introversion and extroversion are personality traits.

Well, you, you have these three main things that you spoke about. Will to sell, the DNA and the competencies. How do you define will to sell? What is, what does that, what does that mean to the success of a salesperson?

That's. Let's take a basketball game, crunch time, last two minutes, which sometimes takes 10 minutes to play out. I mean, if there's basketball, right? So. So there's a lot of pushing and shoving and whistles and free thr. And the game's over and one team wins by two points and double overtime. And the color analyst says, well, it wasn't pretty, but Colorado found a way to win and will. Will to sell is that it's heart, it's grit, it's guts, it's finding a way to win. So desire, how badly you want to succeed and commitment, your willingness to do whatever it takes. That's the stuff you see in crunch time.

Now, is that. Is that desire more of an external or internal thing? Of the. Is. Are we looking at the internal desire like, I want to be the best, or the external desire of I want everybody else to know I'm the best.

I want to be the best. Heart comes from within. And so motivation is part of will to sell. And outlook. How you feel about yourself is part of will to sell. And responsibility, whether you make excuses or own what you've done is part of will to sell.

Yeah. I always talk about the difference between drive and motivation. Motivation is kind of the thing that gets you started. You get all excited about something, but drive is the thing that gets you through when you hit the obstacles. And that sounds like what you're willing.

Yeah. If. If desire is how badly you want to succeed, then motivation is why. What is it that's making that so important?

Maybe my favorite question of asking any new recruit is, what. What motivates you? Because nine times out of 10, they're going to say the same thing. They're going to say money. But then I asked that question. You just said, well, why? Why is that? And causes and pauses make causes pauses to make them think a little bit about, you know, what is my desire to do this?

And money's a crappy answer because one per one person, you know, money means I want to make a million dollars to another person, money means I want to make $50,000. So it. It has no reference point when. When you ask about money. And the other thing is money motivation has changed. We've got 30 years of data on 2 million salespeople, and that is the one finding that's fluid. That. That changed dramatically after the financial crisis in 2008, 2009, into 2010, money motivation, or extrinsic motivation, went from 54% of all salespeople being extrinsically motivated down to 29% of all salespeople being extrinSICALLY motivated. There were two reasons for that. The younger people coming into the sales world, the millennials, typically are not extrinsically motivated. They're out to change the world, not get rich. And then the media shamed those of us who were materialistic. Remember, there was a big. A big, huge portion of people who had houses that were bigger than they could afford and couldn't pay for them. And the housing crisis happened then. So they were shamed into not being extrinsically motivated anymore. So they changed and they gave up.

We actually, we talk about it quite a bit, too. Like, if you can dig In a little bit past that money thing. Because that's like the, the pat response.

That's right.

The right answer. Right. It isn't most people think they're supposed to say, but this younger group coming through, these millennials and even the ones behind them, they really are trying to change the world. And if you can give them a good reason about whatever they're doing with you, it's going to be something that can change the world. Because of their effort that's put forth, you can get a lot out of them and they feel good about it, and it's for the right reasons, which to me is kind of cool, to be honest with you.

It is cool.

I grew up where it was money motivated, man. I wanted a big house. Me too.

Me too. But it changed, you know, after I had all that stuff. I'm 65 now, so I can't keep chasing the almighty dollar forever, right? So at some point you have to say, okay, I made it. And so what else is important? What do I really want to do with the rest of my life? What do I want to do with my business? But if you're hiring younger people, then you don't have to hire money motivated people, but you do have to hire motivated people. Something needs to motivate them to show up, sell, and get rejected every day.

So these assessments determine that, right? Like their motivation. Do you suggest for people, whenever they're in the interview process, you see this high level of motivation, do you suggest them, asking them about what that motivation is so they can better understand it, work with them better?

Well, let's, let's put some context into that before we answer that question. So you've typically assessed a candidate prior to meeting them, prior to talking to them on the phone. All you've got, like today, if you're going to recruit salespeople, you're going to get 400 applications instead of four, which it might have been six months ago. So you don't want to read 400 resumes, you don't want to talk to 400 people on the phone. So you assess 400 people. It doesn't cost a penny more to assess 400 than it does to cost four to assess four. So you assess all 400. 300 of them going to come back not recommended. So you're done with them. Now you've got 150of those aren't going to have the background that you want. So now you're down to 50. Those are the ones you call on the phone, the best sounding ones. You'll bring in for an interview. Now you've got them in for an interview, you've got a resume and you've got your dashboard which shows the 21 sales core competencies. If you're interested, ask about motivation. If they score high on motivation, ask what it is that's driving it. If they don't score high on motivation, it's not a deal breaker as long as the rest of their will to sell scores are high. But, but you might want to find out why. They don't seem very motivated. But it's certainly not the focal point of 21 sales core competencies. That's one of 21.

Yeah, it's, it's one of those things that you see today that I struggle a little bit with with this younger group. I've got a son in law, a son, my own kids, plus I know all of their friends. I'm like, what do you want to accomplish in life? Like, I like, hey, what do you, what are you after? Like, I don't know, I don't know. There's a lot of that.

And if I said that to my son, he's, he's 18, he's on his way to college next month, you know. So have you decided what you want to do? No. Do you think you should? Sure. When I was your age, I had a pretty good idea. Congrats, dad.

Yeah, that's the same. I knew I was going to rule the world. I was going to own a business. I had all these things like planned out and that I knew I was going to do. And to deal with that response is a little bit difficult as a parent, just to be honest. But I'm, I'm seeing the fruition of it at this point. They're, they're actually finding those passions and going after those things. And a lot of it is just what's going on in the world today is causing some of that, which is great. There's a little bit of pressure, but yeah, that's cool. So let's talk about the DNA side of things. So that was the will to sell. So the cell's DNA kind of break that down for us just a little bit.

Sure. So sales DNA is a combination of strengths that support sales process, sales strategy, sales tactics, and sales methodology. So you can, you could have learned all the things you're supposed to do when you're selling. You could completely know the sales process and the approach. You could have great strategies and tactics. But if those six major sales DNA strengths appear as weaknesses instead of his strengths, then it Will sabotage you. You won't be able to do the things you've learned, Ask the questions that need to be asked, execute the process that needs to be executed because it'll be too uncomfortable for you, too scary for you, so you'll do something else and you'll avoid.

So you're saying that people can learn it all day long, but the will part of it or the ab, there's just too much fear in the way for them. Is that something they can overcome?

Well, let's. Let's take. I'm five five, okay. And I know more about playing basketball than anybody. I've studied the shot makers, I've shut it. Studied the point guards and the centers and the power forwards. I know where I need to be, I know how I need to shoot. But I can't overcome being 55 and fat. That's my DNA. Right? Or the fact that I'm 65. I'm actually a baseball guy, but basketball makes a better analogy to that one. Right now, sales DNA is everything. If you had to choose between someone who had all the selling competencies but terrible sales DNA, which meant they're a know it all but can't do it, or. Or someone who is lacking the selling competencies but had strong sales DNA, which means they don't know how to do it, but they'll find a way to win. Right? You got to pick the one without the selling competencies but who has a strong sales DNA because you could teach them the selling competencies. You can teach them sales process, sales methodology, sales tactics, sales strategy.

How does the DNA differ from the will to sell? How are those two different?

Okay, so will the cell is heart. It's grit just pushing through. DNA is more specific in that one of the elements of DNA is whether or not you need to be liked. I don't give a right. I don't care what anybody thinks about me, what anybody says about me. I don't need anybody to like me. It just. It doesn't matter. But if you do, if you do need people to like you and an extroverted person is more likely to need to be loved. Okay. That keeps you from being able to ask questions because you think it's rude or ask a tough question because you think a prospect would get pissed off or have the conversation that nobody else has had with this prospect that will get them to respect you and see you as indispensable.

Yeah. So go ahead.

It's. It's more fear and comfort based.

Okay, so one's your heart driving you Forward. The other one's like, what's holding you back?

Yeah, it's your head, it's your brain.

Okay, gotcha. I, I talk about that too. Like, the difference between a good salesperson and a great salesperson is the ability to ask tough questions. The questions that you go, hey, this needs to be asked because we need to help this person understand the decision they're going to make.

There's another, another difference between the good ones and the bad ones. Alfred Gray said this in the 1950s. He was an insurance agency or insurance industry executive. And he said the difference between great salespeople and everybody else is that the great salespeople do the things that nobody else wants to do.

Now that makes a lot of sense because there is work to this. This isn't, I think everybody has like this view of what sales is. You just show up, have a conversation, and maybe somebody buys from you. But there's work to do, there's follow up, there's study, there's practice, there's all these other things that go along with it. So these 21 competencies, like that's the big thing, is that, are those skills related? Are they talent related? Like, what is that?

Great question. So we talked about will to sell. Five of the competencies are inside of will to sell. We talked about sales DNA. Six of the competencies are inside sales DNA. And then we talked about selling competencies. And there's 10 selling competencies. There's hunting, relationship building, relationship building, consultative selling, value selling, qualifying, presentation, approach closing. Then we're moving a few around. So today I think the other three are sales process and CRM. Savvy and mastery of social selling. But tomorrow or someday soon, it'll be sales embraces sales technology, which will include CRM and social sell and video selling and remote selling.

And so when you're telling me your assessments change with the times, that's unusual.

Yeah. Every year. Yep. We reevaluate the 21 and move stuff in and move stuff out. We still measure them. We measure way more than 21, but there's 21 that are the centerpiece.

And you don't have to be good at all of them.

You don't.

Successful as a salesperson. If I don't like, I could imagine that social selling for you is not your favorite thing in the world.

I do a lot of it. Oh, do you really? That's online. Okay. Talk to anybody.

Okay. That's the easy part because we don't actually engage. Okay, I get it.

So the relationship selling, relationship building, that's my low score. Right. Okay.

Okay.

See, we're pretending right now. Yeah. We're having a great conversation. And to some it might look like relationship building, but after this, I'll never talk to you again. I won't reach out to you. I'm not building a true relationship. This is just literally stopping at rapport.

Okay, we're done here. Okay. Well, I was hoping it would go on a little bit longer.

It will if you work at it. But I won't work at it.

Well, I'm a big believer in learning from those that have been the path. So I'll work at it. If you'll still be willing to listen.

Sure. My best friends and I have two of them. I've always had two or three best friends, but I've never had a group of friends. They all know that part of being my friend is that they're gonna have to do the reaching out and they're gonna have to do the calling and the emailing because they know I'm not gonna.

Yeah, you could. You're going to survive either way. And I tend to be the guy in my group that does the reaching out. But I'm. I'm probably the most introverted of all of them, so it's kind of unique. So you said you sold code knives. I did door to door. Right?

It was. Yeah.

So a lot of people that listen to me do a lot of door to door. There's a lot of this door to door approach and so it's a part of what we do and I've done it myself that I completely just despise. It's not something that was enjoyable for me in any way, but I had to have a little bit of a soul searching thing about why was I doing it. And it really came down to the fact that the reason I was doing it is because I was the best choice for them. They don't have anything as good as what I've got. So they need to know about me. And if you didn't want to talk to me that day, that's okay. I'm not holding it against myself or you any. Anyway, just you're having a bad day and on to the next one. How did you approach the whole door to door thing?

I was petrified. It wasn't. It wasn't so much going up to a strange door and knocking on it, that was scary. It was who the folks at Cut Go decided was an ideal prospect. That was terrifying. I grew up in a nice house. I never wanted for anything. It was A nice neighborhood with single family homes. And somewhere along the line, the brain power at Cutco decided that the perfect candidate for, For a set of Cutco knives. Back then a set was $150 or so. Today it's 800. I mean, nice. That was 50 years ago. It, I mean, expensive knives. But they decided that a perfect prospect for this was either a single girl out of high school with her first job, or it was a couple in a neighborhood that of tenement buildings. And so the first time I. My first day of cold calling. So I was a month in, I got dropped off in this horrendous neighborhood in. Where were we? In Rhode Island? One socket. Let me say it the way they do. One socket, Rhode Island. And I, I looked around, there were 12 family buildings everywhere. So that was way past cold calling. I was like, am I gonna live? You know, because I, I had never been in such a place.

You know, your comfort zone.

My friends are either in single family homes or triple deckers, which is a staple of New England. Two family homes, three family homes, single family homes. And now I was in. It looked like pretty depressed area. And I was supposed to be going banging on doors, trying to pedal wicked expensive knives.

So I would love to know their logic behind that.

Well, I can tell you that I, I learned to sell on one sales call with my boss's boss. And this story's in my book, in baseline selling. It was one of these tenement buildings. And we walked up the three flights of stairs and we knocked on the door. And Bob was his name. He got in and it was literally one of those metal kitchen tables with a Formica top. You might have never seen one, but. And then over here, there was a broken sofa with the springs coming through. And then over there was the bedroom. And that was the whole place. It was run down. They didn't have a pot to piss in. And we sat down and Bob just started talking to the mother. And he asked for cookies, he asked for coffee, he asked for milk, and she couldn't wait to make the stuff. And then he started talking to her daughter and he asked her what she was doing, and he asked her what her plans were, and he asked her about eventual marriage. And I'm thinking, like, where are the knives? He didn't even bring them. And he basically found out that she wanted to be married and wanted to have kids and wanted to have nice things and wanted to not have the living condition she was in right now. And he was qualifying her whether she could spend $8 a week right. They had nothing. And the boyfriend knocks on the door and he comes in in a rage. I don't know if he was upset about Bob because he was in his 60s, he's my age now, but he, he didn't like that I was there. I was 18. And his girlfriend was 18. He hated that. So he started screaming at her, what are they doing here? Get them out of here right now. This is stupid. What are you doing? We crazy. And Bob turns to the mother and said, these boys, they're all the same. The only thing they want to do is get in your little girl's panties. And she looks at him and then she looks at her daughter, and then her daughter looks at the boyfriend and says, you're right, Andy. Leave. Leave now. You have no right to talk to me like that. Get out of here. So he leaves. And the mother turns to Bob and pinches his cheek and said, I don't know what you're selling, but we'll take two. And he said, he said, of course. And he said, each set's $150. She said, come with me. And she brings him into her bedroom, lifts up the mattress, pulls out the money, pays him $300 cash. We stay for cookies and milk, and we leave. That. That was the single most incredible selling lesson I ever had. No demo, no presentation, no talking about the product, no talking about money. It was just relationship building and qualifying and learning what was important to them and being able to say stuff that nobody else would ever say.

Yeah, I don't know if I could ever say that. I can say some pretty tough things. So when I first got into sales, I was in the health club industry. I don't know if you know much about that industry, but if you've ever walked into a health club to buy a membership before, they're pretty brutal. Like there was a saying, be backs don't come back and which is a self fulfilling prophecy.

It's kind of like that in the car industry too.

Yeah, it's a self fulfilling prophecy because you're going to be such a jackass by the time it's over. They ain't ever coming back. And I can remember asking this, this woman told me, she, well, I need to go talk to my husband before I decide to do this. And I can remember saying, well, did you have to talk to him whenever you put on those last £40? And it was asking tough questions like that to get people to really think about whose decision was it really to take care of their health? Which is a harsh Way to do it. I would do it a little bit different today, but it is asking those tough questions. I think if anybody gets anything out of that today, that's the thing. Like ask these tough questions that people really need to consider whenever they're making a purchase. So I know I've kept you longer than.

And you know, today I would teach that gym membership person to ask that question right up front. Do you have to talk to your husband to see if it's okay to come to the gym and lose weight? And she would say, of course not. Right.

Like that's how you flip it around.

Right, right.

And I'm big on that too. Like this whole idea of objection defeating questions like you do all those up front. So at the end, the only logical decision is to go with us. There shouldn't be any objections by the time you get done because you've taken them out of the. Out of the situation with great qualifying and question asking up front a full explanation of what it is that you do. So there's no missing puzzle pieces. We see that a lot in contracting where they try to skip through things really fast, trying to close people as quick as possible. And so they get this same objection all the time and they don't know how to handle it. I need to think about it. That's the one they get and what they're really telling you. I think in most cases it could be they just don't like you or your company. That could be part of it. But I think in most cases what they're telling you is something isn't lining up. There's a piece missing somewhere and I don't know what it is, so I can't verbalize it to you. I just know it's not making logical sense to me. So I need some time to think about this, to put that logic together. And that's why I think guys, especially in contracting, what we do, have to lay out what that whole thing is going to look like so they can see that picture in their head become part of that story. And then at the end of that story, it's never Never Land. Everything's perfect and everything's great. If you miss any pieces that. And you're getting that I need to think about it. That's probably what's happening. How do you handle I need to think about it. Hopefully you don't.

There are always going to be people that say that because some people make a habit out of doing that. That's one of the competencies inside of sales DNA. How do you make a major purchase yourself. And if you buy in such a way that you need to think it over, you're gonna take them from prospects. And if you look for the lowest price, then you're going to be vulnerable to the prospect that wants to buy that way. And if you comparison shop, then you're going to be vulnerable to the prospect that comparison shops. So the way you avoid a think it over is to make sure that you've got a very compelling reason for them to buy. It's got to be compelling and that they're thoroughly qualified and that there isn't anybody else they need to be talking to. And you don't close until they're ready to be closed because they're buying on their timeline, not on your timeline. So you gotta close. When they're finally closable and too many salespeople jump the gun, they don't have anything left to say. So I guess I gotta close. And that's not when you close, you close. When all the ducks are in a row and all the milestones have been checked off, when everybody has arrived, we.

All get to the same place.

Yes.

Oh, man, I could talk to you about sales all day long. And like, I know you don't have all day and plus, you don't like people that much, so.

That's right.

We want to make sure we get this in. So this is.

Well, I do like people who acknowledge that.

Okay.

Okay.

So I acknowledge. So this assessment thing, what's the accuracy of it? Like, if I. If I run it through assessment and it says, hey, this person's. And you've got a couple recommended, worthy of consideration and not recommended, Those are the three pieces. So worthy of consideration, what's the likelihood that person's going to turn out okay?

Well, it's less likely than someone who's recommended. So there are two important numbers. When the assessment says not recommended, we've got some pretty smart clients who think they know better than we do. And the assessments has not recommended, but they already fell in love with the candidate and they hire them, 75% of those candidates fail inside of six months. Wow. That's how accurate the not recommended finding is. The recommended finding, if a company does their due diligence on the candidate, checks, references, interviews them a couple of times, hires them. 92% of those candidates rise to the top half of their sales force within 12 months. Wow.

92%.

Half.

And they're still there.

Yeah, yeah. And. And if you're worried about whether they'll stay, we have a. A Finding called longevity, which predicts the likelihood that this candidate will still be around in time for you to get a 5x return on investment on the, on the new salesperson.

Is that how we should look at salespeople, as a return on investment?

Give me a better way.

I'm with you. You don't hear that from people. You don't hear because you've seen all kinds of studies. And I have to, I'm sure that like what it costs to actually hire somebody and I always see somewhere around 50,000 bucks is like what it does cost you in the long run with lost time, training, expense to hire, ramping them up to speed and all the other things of what you would have with a quality personal. And so if you know that and 75% are not going to turn out on the not recommended 75% of the time, you're going to waste $50,000.

Okay. Yeah, I like the other way around.

92. My $50,000 is going to be pretty good. It's, it's almost an outlandish claim.

Right?

Like almost to hear that.

Except, except we have our assessments validated by an outside third party firm. So that's what they came up with.

Yeah, I can remember first, you know Andy, right?

Andy who?

Miller.

Yes.

And so he's my guy.

And so first he's your coach from omg.

Yeah. And, and I, and I, I called, I called bullshit on it. I was like no way. Not 92%, just no way. And he, he showed, he's like, yeah, actually it is. And here's who does this. And he explained to me how it all worked and I was like man, that is absolute. I gotta get involved in this. And it has been very helpful to the people that we've already started to implement it with. If, if people wanted to find out more about you, like your book and stuff like that, where would they go to find out that information?

Well, the easiest place is to go to my blog. That's omghub.com and this is 1900 articles I've written since baseline selling was published. And there's links to contact me, but if they're interested in getting our assessment they can contact you.

Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. Because you do have to be certified. You got to go through this whole certification process which was pretty like in depth. There was, there was more to it than I thought there was. I thought I was like eh, pass a quiz, get it. And no, it was actually had to take some classes and courses and understand things which was super great. And you also give us coaches, like we have a coach we work with that helps us better understand. Understand.

And you had to pay us money for the right to be able to provide these assessments.

Yeah, we did. I see how you're doing that now. So I always ask people a couple of questions and it'll be the last two questions I ask you and I'll let you go. I'm very appreciative of your time. So today, other than getting married or kids or any of that kind of family stuff, what's been your greatest achievement?

Keith, you should have sent me a little note, said, I'm going to ask you that question.

I like it when it's off the cuff better. It seems to be more real.

Greatest achievement, without a doubt is creation of the OMG Salesforce Evaluations and Sales Candidate Assessments.

Yeah, you should be.

I built that, I invented that and continue to reinvent it every single day.

I like that part of it too, that you're constantly looking to improve it, not just on what it currently is, but what it's going to be based on the times too.

So that's some of the best changes we made were suggestions from people like you, partners that provide the assessments to their clients and from clients who said it would be great. I'll give you one example. We had a client who said, you know, some of the salespeople we hire seem to come out of the gate flying and they make an immediate impact on our company with sales. And others seem to be more plotters and they make an impact, but it takes longer. How can we identify the people who will come storming out of the gate and distinguish them from everybody else? And it was probably the hardest feature I ever, ever had to build into the product. We called it Figure it out factor F I o F you've seen it there. And I had to reverse engineer it. I needed to go out to clients and say, give me the names of people we recommended that took off like a rocket ship when you hired them and give me the names of people that you hired that succeeded but didn't take off like a rocket ship. It took a little longer, longer. And I spent weeks going through 180 columns of data on all of these different. I think there were 500 salespeople in the data set that I looked at. And you know, normally you can reverse engineer a finding because you can make a hypothesis about what you think it's going to be. And all of my hypotheses didn't work. None of them came out. So I Started looking at places I didn't expect them to be, and it. There ended up being five, just five factors, and two of them were so counterintuitive. It's just incredible. But I'm not going to get into all the details. That's proprietary. But it was pretty cool.

Yeah. I was about to ask you, so I kind of thought you might go, nah, I can't tell you. But that's. That's super cool, because that's one of the things I really liked about the assignment, was that figure it out factor, because that's the ideal people we want to hire. They don't bombard me with questions a thousand times. They want to figure it out on their own. We call them logical learners. They see a puzzle, and they want to put that puzzle piece together, and they do it pretty quickly.

So.

Last question. We all only have so much time on this planet, and we all, you know, that time is going to come to an end. How do you want to be remembered? What's the legacy that Dave Kurland wants to leave behind?

Great husband, great dad. Done.

Amen. Oh, good. I. I like it. That's how quick that answer should be.

Like, you.

You know, it. There isn't. You didn't have to pause the other stuff.

Doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, that. That helped build the life that we have and supported the things we want to do, but beyond that, it doesn't matter.

That's awesome, Dave. This has been. Like I said, I knew it was gonna be good. It was even better than I thought it was gonna be.

Oh, boy.

It was. It was fantastic. I did not know that you were an introvert, though. So this is kind of a big deal to, like, get you on here. I appreciate that. And. And. And you do very well. You've learned the skills very well. Nobody would ever know. So it's good to have you on board. Thank you very much.

Thanks for inviting me. It was fun.

Yeah, awesome.

As much fun as I can have.

We're not caring about us at all. Super great. All right, guys, we're out of here. This has been Contractor Radio. Make sure you find us on any of your podcast outlets. Just search Contractor Radio. You'll find this episode and follow us at Contractor Coach Pro. And if you're looking for assessments, check us out. We've got those for you. And we can help you find the best quality sales candidates that turn out 92% of the time when they recommend it. Talk to you all later. We'll see you.