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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 Problem With The Data….
Data has always been a little problematic. Too often, we find the data that supports what the views we may have already formed. We may have problems with certain people, we find the data that supports them being the wrong people, so we can move them out of the organization. Alternatively, we have a person we really like, or a program, or a change initiatives. We find the data to support what we want to do. Sometimes we use the data to help us identify problem areas, developing plans to improve. For example, no self respecting sales person/manager would find […]
Pet Peeves–LinkedIn Surveys
This is #B2BPetPeeves week (Thanks Hank Barnes and friends). This morning I started scrolling through my LinkedIn Feed. I hit my first LinkedIn Survey, “How much profit is ‘enough?’” It had the following choices, $50-100K/year, $100-300K/year, $300-600K/year, $600k-1M/year. Huh??????? I thought I misread it. I went to look at Microsoft’s net income for it’s past fiscal year, $61B. Then I looked at Amazon’s, $21.3B. Then Facebook’s, $10.3 B. I could go, but you get the point. What does this question even mean? Yet it had generated 875 votes, 137 “likes,” and 39 comments–my favorite started with, “You are playing with […]
Goal Attainment Is More Than Making The Number!
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve had a lot of conversations about sales performance. It’s largely driven by planning for the next calendar year. Too often, I get the comment, “People are making their numbers, but we aren’t achieving our goals!” Too often, the driving metric for sales performance is “the number,” quota, or the revenue goal. Performance and comp is driven by a single number. It’s binary, you make/exceed it and you are a hero. You don’t make your number and you are on an improvement plan. One group was, largely hitting their revenue targets. But as we […]
“The Joy Of Selling…,” Have We Lost It?
As a preface, my friend, Hank Barnes, wrote me saying he and several others are declaring October 12 as “World B2B Pet Peeve Day.” He asked me to contribute a post commemorating this occasion. I struggled a moment. Regular readers know that I write a lot about “pet peeves.” Whether it’s bad prospecting, bad Social Channel interactions, bad selling, weak sales management, ineffective training, and so forth. I’ve written so much on where we are underperforming our potential as sales professionals, or undeserving out customers. I thought for a while, then realized something that has been bothering me for some […]
“Sorry For Reaching Out Randomly….”
I’m quickly going through my email. I opened an email that I knew would be a prospecting email, but I decided to read it since it had made it through all the filters I set up. I made it through the first 2 sentences: “Hi David,Hope you’re doing well! We are sorry for reaching out randomly.” I stopped there, adding the email to my spam folder to block future communications. The problem, we can never be prospecting randomly. Yet most of what I see is just that, a random outreach because someone has guessed my email, phone number or social […]
Who Is Your Customer?
Do you know who your customer is? More importantly, do you know who your customer isn’t? Perhaps the biggest thing that impacts our performance is we don’t know who our customer, we define our ideal customer in such vague terms that we waste a lot of time and brand equity on customers that we should never be selling to. If my various inboxes are any indicator, the majority of sales and marketing people do no targeting other than, “Do we have an email? A phone number? A LinkedIn ID? We get prospecting outreaches from companies that should never reach us. […]