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
“Playing The Game,” Measuring The Right Things, Measuring Things Right
A great client and I were having a conversation about sales performance. He’s the manager of a high performing sales team–but it hasn’t always been that way. We were discussing the “before” and “after.” He characterized the “before” as heavily activity oriented. Each sales person had activity metrics–numbers of prospecting calls, numbers of customer meetings, numbers of proposals, numbers of bathroom breaks—OK, just seeing if you are paying attention. Everything was measured, coaching focused on making the numbers–the activity numbers, not the goals/outcomes. For a while that approach was OK, they were making their goals. As goals increased, as the […]
The Present Opportunity
Our societies, communities, workplaces and businesses are in turmoil. The Covid-19 virus, oil prices, and other disruptions are converging on creating business and economic crises–and opportunities. The natural reaction of many sales people is to sit back, saying, “The economy is bad, people aren’t buying!” The reality is, this is the time when there is a higher propensity to buy than any other time. Think about it for a moment, when things are good, the mentality of many is, “Why change?” There are still problems, but there may be less urgency in addressing those problems. When do people buy? When […]
Buying Is About People, Why Isn’t Selling?
Buying is about people. They are part of organizations and teams. They are united in achieving a goal. Whether it’s to address a new opportunity, solve a problem, learn and grow; a buying group works together to achieve a goal. The buying process is messy, a characteristic of intensely human interaction. The research tells us this with data about how many buying efforts end in no decision made. We map the buying process, ending up with something that resembles Gartner’s famous “spaghetti” charts. The buying group has to deal with and align the priorities and agendas of each person involved, […]
Knowledge Is Power, Shared Knowledge Is….
Knowledge is power. We try to accumulate as much knowledge as we can. It gives us deeper understanding, it gives us insight, it helps us learn things or become aware of things we may have missed. The more knowledge we have, the better prepared we might be in addressing challenges, recognizing new opportunities, and managing risk. Knowledge is power. But sometimes we wield knowledge and that power as a weapon. We keep the knowledge to ourselves, we exploit it to our advantage, we use it to disadvantage others–our people, our colleagues, our customers, our managers. There’s an interesting thing about […]
Who’s Your Laziest Salesperson?
Increasingly, there is a tendency to measure our value by activities and our “busyness.” Managers set activity metrics, rigorously measuring performance against those metrics. Sales people rush from activity to activity, seldom having the time to meet their goals. We implement new technologies, enabling our people to increase the number of activities they can accomplish in a given period. And when those activities fail to achieve the outcomes we want, we just increase the activity requirements. The thinking is always, “we will produce more results if we just do more….” Yet the market data shows year after year of declining […]
Committed To Failing
We have very confused attitudes and beliefs about failure and failing. In sales and marketing, specifically, this confusion is somewhat ironic, since failure is such a large part of what we do. Recently I wrote about a terribly dangerous view about failure: “Making It Safe To Fail, Hogwash!” There’s a lot of social pscho-babble on failure, the thinking parallels the thinking that, “everyone gets a trophy, win, lose, just show up….., it’s the effort that counts!” I, also, suggested a different perspective in, “Making It Safe To Succeed.” This post will, for the time being, wrap up my temper tantrum […]