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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
Raising My Game
I find myself, increasingly, writing posts about the terrible state of practice in selling. There are the posts about terrible prospecting, clueless sales people, horrible managers. These posts generate a lot of attention and activity. The comments, likes, and shares skyrocket. I suppose it’s human nature, we all have so much fun calling out obviously bad performance. And sadly, there are too many examples of horrible sales practice. It becomes too easy to call these out. It really isn’t a problem with the sales people we call out, it’s a management and leadership problem. It’s managers that encourage and train […]
“We Need To Discount…..”
It was a morning of deal reviews. The sales person was reviewing the deals expected to close by the end of the quarter. Deal after deal, there were differing issues that had to be addressed for each deal. We developed action plans to address them. But I started noticing a problem, 100% of the deals required a “discount.” “What’s the problem, why do we need to discount in each of these deals?” I asked. “Do we have a pricing problem? Or is it something else?” The sales person immediately responded, “Yes we have a pricing problem, we need to substantively […]
“Begin With The End In Mind….”
The second habit in Stephen Covey’s classic, The Seven Habit Of Highly Effective People, is “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s extraordinarily powerful in so many ways. Today, I was participating in a number of deal reviews. They weren’t remarkably different from the 1000’s of other deal reviews I participate in. The sales people, outlined the deal, where they were and the next steps. As usual, all of the deal were significantly behind where the sales people wanted them to be. They were slipping from quarter to quarter. Some, which had been sure things, were now at risk. As […]
Achieving Our Goals Through Our Customers
Sales people tend to be incredibly goal oriented. We are focused on hitting our numbers–our performance, often our compensation is based on whether we are hitting our numbers. As a result, we and our managers are intensely focused. We measure ourselves based on quota attainment. We focus on getting the PO, getting the order so that we achieve our goals. Somewhat incredibly, sales people go to customers saying, “I need your order this month to hit my goals…..” Usually that’s accompanied with, “If you do, I’ll give you a discount.” The problem is, it’s not the customer’s job to help […]
“Figuring Things Out,” Part Of Our Job
It started with a pipeline review. The pipeline was anemic, despite having discussed this problem for some time, there was no change–at least for the positive. Some opportunities we had hoped for had fallen out or been deferred (Yet another time). No new opportunities had been qualified. Prospecting seemed to be sporadic and unfocused. If you have been on a pipeline review with me, you may be thinking I’m singling you out. Sadly, I wish this was the exception, but at least 70% of the reviews I participate in have these characteristics. So feel bad, but know you aren’t being […]
Helping Our Customers Face Uncertainty
Probably the single biggest issue anyone and every organization faces today is uncertainty. Each of us faces things few have every experienced in the past–at least at this magnitude. We have a global health pandemic, economic, political and social turmoil. We have businesses that are facing massive disruption. We face impacts personally, to our families and communities. We face issues within our jobs, functions, our organizations. They become more complex as we work with our customers, partners, suppliers; just as they are facing the same types of challenges. We, all, are looking for answers to questions where there are no […]