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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
Do Your Friggin Homework!
We struggle with achieving goals and producing results. Whether it’s prospecting or working a deal, we diminish our impact and results because we aren’t doing our homework and preparing ourselves and our customers/prospects to accomplish our shared goals. It starts with our prospecting and establishing new relationships. For example, this morning I get a LinkedIn invitation from someone in the ‘protection and counter-terrorism” field. He wanted to connect with professionals in the same field. Or those that say, “I want to learn more about you and your business,” yet they’ve not even taken the time to look at my profile. […]
Are You Managing The Process Or Is It Managing You?
Deal review after deal review, I see the same thing. Sales people don’t seem to be managing the process, they are responding to what the customer is doing (or not doing). This is particularly frightening, when one recognizes customers don’t know how do buy, they wander through the buying process, going back and forth, starting and stopping, changing direction, getting lost. Then more frightening, the majority of their buying journeys end in no decision made. But deal review after deal review, I pose the question, “What are the next two critical things you and the customer must do to move […]
Sales People Need To Pay Their Way!
Over the past several weeks, I’ve gotten into a number of discussions about the “economics of selling.” They’ve covered the gamut from rationalizing what we spend on sales and sales people, affordability and how much we can invest, to optimizing the investment we make in sales, assuring we get return on those investments. In one conversation, a statement struck me, “Sales people have to pay their own way.” All of a sudden, it struck me that the reality is sales people have to pay the way for everyone in the company, not just paying their own way. Stated differently, everyone’s […]
Why Change?
The salesperson was getting frustrated. We were doing a deal review. It was a huge deal for him, and important deal for the company, for the quarter. He’d been working on the deal for several years. In recent months, he’d finally gotten some key users interested in the product he sold. They had committed to take the proposal to senior management to get approval. “I’m confident this will close this quarter,” he stated. I asked a question, “Why should they change?” The sales person was confused, I suppose a little frustrated with why I, an outside consultant, was questioning him. […]
On Micromanaging And Collaborative Reviews
I was working with a team of frustrated sales people. They had a past sales manager that micromanaged them terribly. The manager would get involved in too many deals. He would constantly dictate next steps. His deal reviews became opportunities where the team updated him on what was happening, so he could dictate the next steps. The entire focus of the manager’s micromanagement was on him and his ability to achieve his goals. They had nothing to do with what the customer was trying to achieve. They had nothing to do the realities they faced in working with customers, with […]
“Do Or Not Do, There Is No Try”
I’m dating myself with this quote from that master philosopher, Yoda. This goes back to the first Star Wars movie in 1977 (Of course, I was in kindergarden at the time 😉 I’m stunned by the number of sales people that don’t understand the principle. Everyday, I encounter sales people who are very busy. They are working very hard to get what they get. The problem is, what they are getting is far short of their target and goals. I ask them, “What are you doing to close the gap to your goal?” The response, usually, “I’m doing everything I […]