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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
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.
Latest Posts
The Coaching Isn’t the Meeting
We schedule coaching. We block the calendar, our weekly meeting. Maybe an hour, maybe thirty minutes. We do the deal review on Tuesday and the coaching session on Thursday. We prepare for it, we show up to it, we get through it, and we leave believing we coached. The meeting happened, so the coaching must have happened. We check it off our list. That belief is the problem. We’ve turned coaching into an event, a specific meeting. But the thing we are working on with the individual doesn’t work on a schedule. Go back to what I talked about in […]
Stop Coaching The Deal, Playing Whack-A-Mole In Our Coaching
Once a manager accepts that coaching is the job, the next problem shows up immediately. What do you coach? Here’s what is on everyone’s list: Discovery. Qualification. Objection handling. Managing the deal strategy. Pipeline hygiene. Forecast accuracy. Prospecting. Account planning. Using the methodology. Using AI. And that’s just the start. These lists never end. Every item is a real thing a seller could be better at. The temptation of most managers is to coach all of them. In the deal review, they might focus on deal strategy, call planning, and using the methodology. In the pipeline review, pipeline quality, volume/velocity, […]
Everyone Agrees Coaching Matters…
…Almost No One Does It Most front line sales managers don’t know that coaching is their job. They were the best seller on the team. That’s why they got promoted. And no one told them the work had changed, so they kept doing the thing they were good at, just from a higher position. Taking over important calls, rescuing stalled deals, directing the efforts of the people they lead. They believe that’s management, individual contribution with a bigger title and more responsibility. The coaching that is so important for them to be doing never happens, largely because they never knew […]
We Keep Falling Out Of Alignment
We depend on each other. I do my job so you can do yours. You do yours so the person next to you can do theirs. That dependence is the whole reason alignment matters. If none of us needed anyone else, we could each go our own way and it wouldn’t cost anything. But we do need each other, and when the handoffs don’t line up, things misfire and results founder. So we try to align. Our instinct is to use a model we know works: the assembly line. Fixed roles, clear handoffs, specific cadences. Every part and every step […]
He Pointed His Finger At Me……
I had a mentor who taught me more in a single gesture than most people manage in a career. We were deep in a conversation about what separates people who succeed from people who don’t, and at some point he started pointing his finger at me to drive home a critical point. He went on for a while like that, shaking the finger forcefully. Then he stopped, held his hand up and said: “Remember, when you point your finger at someone, telling them what they should be doing, one finger is pointing at them, but three are pointing back at […]
Comp Plans Aren’t Your Problem!
I’ve never dreamed of writing about commissions or comp plans. Everyone has their own views about them, and no single answer is right. I have close friends who argue fiercely against commissions, and they lead some of the highest-performing organizations in the world. I’ve also worked with organizations with very strong comp and commission plans, and many are outstanding performers. And yet here I am writing about comp. Why? Increasingly, I’m seeing more organizations not achieving their goals. One of the first issues people focus on is comp and commission. It seems to be the universal solution to performance. I […]
