Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Front line managers have the highest impact in driving seller performance. Sadly, too many organizations fail to set these managers up for success, as a result, the organization underperforms it’s potential. Millions are spent on training, tools, technology for individual contributors, while little is invested for front line managers. Coaching individual contributors is viewed as critical to their development and success, yet front line managers receive little or no coaching themselves. How do we reverse this? What do we do to set these FLMs up for success, maximizing their own ability to perform, and through that, maximizing the performance of […]
Read MoreWe are in the business of behavioral steering. Whether it’s working with our customers, collaborating with peers, or as leaders working with our teams, we constantly seek to shape behaviors. Sometimes gently, often deliberately, sometimes without even knowing that we are doing it. Behavioral steering is the process of designing choices, contexts, or presenting information intended to drive certain actions or outcomes. We use it in helping customers make a buying decision, coaching our people to more effectively achieve their goals, influencing our peers in developing and executing strategies. And others steer us, to influence our own actions and behaviors. […]
Read MoreWhen did, “just good enough,” become the standard for performance? Too many sellers and leaders seem to be going through the motions. They are putting in the hours, many measuring their success by the hours they work, rather than the results produced. Seeing inspirational or even driven performance has become a rarity. Mediocrity seems to be the norm. It’s not that people aren’t busy, they are overwhelmed and overloaded. It’s not that people aren’t achieving their goals–they are doing what they can. They may be hitting their numbers, they are attending meetings, doing their activities. I see uninspired customer meetings–following […]
Read MoreSometimes, I sound like a broken record (Hmmm, I need to update that metaphor). Selling isn’t about pitching solutions. It’s about helping customers understand and solve their problem. It’s about helping the customer develop and maintain change urgency. This shift drives higher levels of customer engagement, builds greater trust, and higher win rates. It reduces buying/sales cycles by 30-40%. But when I talk about this, I often get pushback from sellers. It usually boils down to this, “I can’t afford to take the time to help customers understand and define their problems. What if I do all that work, and […]
Read MoreI was struck by a LinkedIn post with the opening line: “Microsoft just made QBR prep obsolete. And CSMs everywhere should be celebrating.” The rest of the article talked about how Microsoft has integrated AI into it’s products, eliminating all the work needed to prepare the charts for a QBR. And there is post after post, outlining the same principles. We no longer have to do pre-call research and prep, there are AI tools that do all of it for us, presenting us the call plan a few minutes before we make the call. Or after the call, we no […]
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