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Today’s show featured an interview with sales expert Dave Kurlan.
Find Dave on LinkedIn.
DAVE’S TIP: “People don’t buy presentations. Sales presentations are simply the same as political theater. If the selling was done properly, a person at a time, upfront, ahead of the presentation, the decisions have already been made. The lines have already been drawn, the presentation’s not going to change anybody’s mind. It’s just theater, where the people on the buying committee get to ask some great memorable question and impress their boss or their boss’s boss who happens to be in the room. There’s nothing you can do in a presentation that’s going to change that.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m very excited. On today’s show, we got Dave Kurlan. Dave has been a guest on the Sales Game Changes Podcast. Dave, you’re a living legend. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Dave Kurlan: Well, I’m a sales guy. I’ve been selling since 1973. Started my sales development business in 1985, started Objective Management Group in 1990, exited from Objective Management Group late in 2023. Here I am still with Kurlan & Associates, which I started in October of 1985, and loving every minute of it, especially the selling part.
Fred Diamond: With that being said, Dave Kurlan, tell us a great sales story.
Dave Kurlan: I knew you were going to ask me that question, and there were a few that qualified, but I’m going to pick this one story where we were one of the sales consultancies that were being considered for an elephant on one of those billion-dollar enterprises. The sales presentation was for the final three shortlisted companies. It was over Zoom because it was during COVID, and they had 10 of their leaders on the other end of the Zoom and there were two of us. We pulled up the slide deck that they asked for and never moved past the first slide, the slide that basically said Kurlan & Associates. Instead, we spent our hour asking them questions, listening to their concerns, discussing possibilities, talking about what they were really trying to accomplish that was different from their freaking RFP that they sent out, and said goodbye.
A couple weeks later, we were awarded this really large piece of business. It was one of the biggest we had ever been awarded. I always ask when there’s competition, “Why did you pick us?” One of the competitors for this was Deloitte, one of the big five, big four. They said, “Well, the Deloitte folks were really slick and really polished, and they had a really polished, slick slide deck, but that’s all they had. They didn’t seem to really care about us or what we wanted, or what we did, or what we were trying to change. They weren’t able to communicate how they could help us do that. They just read their slides.”
Now, my wife’s cousin works for Deloitte. After that conversation, I called him and I said, “Chris, since when does Deloitte do sales consulting and sales training and sales development and sales transformation?”
He said, “We don’t.”
I said, “Well, we just competed against Deloitte, beat Deloitte. They had a team of six people on this Zoom. They presented a slick slide deck on sales transformation.”
He said, “Yeah, we go after everything, and if we win it, then we would reach out to people like you and learn what we could learn, and then just pass on that knowledge.”
The really important story here, it’s not that we did what we did and that Deloitte did what they did. It’s about not being intimidated by the big company and the big buying committee and sticking to sales process. Sales process doesn’t call for you to do a big presentation. Sales process calls for you to have a conversation. By sticking to our guns and doing what we teach, and having the good conversation that nobody else was willing to have with them, we stuck out and differentiated ourselves, just like we teach our clients to do.
Fred Diamond: I was surprised when you said one of your big competitors was Deloitte, and I think it’s the big four now, by the way. That’s not a name that I hear ever mentioned in this context of the sales performance improvement community. It’s interesting that they’re trying to get whatever gigs they can get, but I literally never see them anywhere. The other thing too is, that’s what you do. You guys do this particular thing that they needed, so you knew to ask the right questions and you understood how they were answering the questions and what that led to the next thing that you were going to say.
Dave, what’s a tip that you could take away from that great story?
Dave Kurlan: People don’t buy presentations. I wrote an article about this recently, that sales presentations are simply the same as political theater. If you think about the public hearings that take place in the halls of Congress, where each senator or congressman has five minutes to, if they want, ask questions of the witness, but more often just do a speech that they hope will go viral on Twitter and YouTube, five minutes of me sounding awesome. That’s because the decisions about these topics have already been made, and now there’s just theater. With presentations, it’s usually the same way.
If the selling was done properly, a person at a time, upfront, ahead of the presentation, the decisions have already been made. The lines have already been drawn, the presentation’s not going to change anybody’s mind. It’s just theater, where the people on the buying committee get to ask some great memorable question and impress their boss or their boss’s boss who happens to be in the room. There’s nothing you can do in a presentation that’s going to change that.
The backdrop is we had already met with these people one-on-one, and they had already formed their opinion. But the main decision-maker was pretty attracted to Deloitte. But it was clear from what happened with everybody doing their political theater in the presentation, that the folks they had already met with and already talked to, they had already determined that we were the ones that were best suited and the best experts and the most in tune with what they needed to help them achieve their goals.
Fred Diamond: I have a similar example. I worked at Compaq Computer in the mid-‘90s and Compaq was very horizontal up until that point. I was looking to move into vertical markets and they had a division that focused on government. They grew it to about 20 million, which was pretty small, but I’ll get to the punchline here. Compaq hired McKinsey & Partners to do an analysis of the federal and other public sector markets like education. I was on the Compaq team that was supporting the McKinsey people and they gave a great presentation. It was very slick. There was a lot of data points. They convinced Compaq’s senior leadership that they should focus on the public sector markets, which I had come to learn Compaq already had done, which is why they hired me and some other people.
At the end of the meeting, the VP of sales, a guy named Ross Cooley, went up to my boss, a guy named Gary Newgard, and said to Newgard, he said, “They just told us for 100k what you’ve been telling me for the last five years.” It was maybe bringing on a Deloitte, it sounds like an easy thing, but you have a hungry company like yours, Kurlan & Associates, who’ve been there, done that, who knows exactly, with having done probably hundreds if not thousands of engagements, what they were looking for.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo