Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Changing Our Mindsets
Our mindset impacts how we think of and engage our customers. It impacts both our conscious and unconscious behavior. It impact the language we use in talking about and talking to customers. The mindset for sales and marketing seems to be, increasingly, oriented to the things we do to our customers. Our language and processes betray this thinking: We “target” them with our messaging/prospecting.Our “battlecards” guide us on our engagement process.We qualify them for opportunities.We move them through our selling process. If we are “sophisticated,” we phrase it as their buying process–even though we constantly “sell.” We seldom help them […]
Systems Of Alignment
As we reflect on the process of getting things done in business, one of the most important principles is the concept of alignment. Perhaps, simplified to, “How do we get everyone in the same boat, rowing the same direction, in cadence, at top speed?” As one looks at consistently high performing organizations, we see fanatic alignment—usually starting with a highly aligned culture, values, and leadership that models the expected behaviors. And, as you look in every corner of the organization, you find universal alignment and ownership–people have internalized these things and own them for themselves. By contrast, the majority of […]
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 […]