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
Wearing A Blue Suit Drives Higher Win Rates
Periodically, we do deep research on what drives winning. A couple of years ago, I revealed some of the research in, “In Examining 27,357 Wins, 95% Of Sales People Did This One Thing.” Those conclusions are still valid. But we’ve learned some new thing. One of the most remarkable observations is that wearing a Blue Suit drives win rates that are about 2+ times higher than any other color suit. Digging into the research, I always wear suits in calling on customers. (Yeah, I’m very old school.) I have 5 blue suits and two grey suits. I rotate them, so […]
Time Available For Selling
Without a doubt, sales people have a lot of things that distract them from being engaged with customers. The majority is probably imposed by their companies, a lot is self imposed (read avoidance and excuses). We want to reduce and eliminate as many of these time drains as possible. We impose a lot of administrivia and reporting on our sales people. Simplifying our business processes, leveraging tools, technologies, are just simply stopping doing things enable us to recover a lot of time for selling. We can eliminate or reduce a lot of those things we need to do to prepare […]
When The Incremental Cost Of Stupidity Is $0
I’m at the ripe young age where I have seen a lot of different scenarios for marketing, demand gen, lead gen, and prospecting. In the “old days,” many of our techniques were oriented around F2F, direct marketing, and telephone calls. We looked at the cost of every program we conducted, managing to a certain budget or cost per qualified lead. In F2F, we had the time of the sales person, the travel expense and so forth. With marketing programs, direct marketing was king. We’d look at the cost of developing the program, the cost of printing the collateral, and the […]
The Forecast Review
We are only a few days into a new quarter, but I’m deep into forecast reviews. We are both discussing performance on last quarter’s forecast and doing the forecast for the current quarter. I was talking to one manager about his forecast. His team typically pursued very large deals. The average deal size was well over $1M, they were typically long cycle (12-18 months). Here’s our conversation, see if you can spot the problems: Manager: “We did pretty well last quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, my forecast showed we would deliver about $20M. We beat that, barely, delivering […]
Process Is The Foundation For Agility/Nimbleness
We want to be flexible, nimble, able to adapt to the circumstances, leap on an opportunity, respond quickly. We abhor process since that constrains our creativity and ability to innovate. Too often, when I talk to leaders and sales people about process, they cite some of the things outlined above as the reason they don’t want process. The reality, is they don’t understand agile, lean, nimbleness. The mistake random reactions/responses for being agile, when they are about the furthest thing from agile and lean possible. In reality everything in agile and lean is based on deep understanding of process. Process […]
Starting Over
Sales is one of the few professions where we get to start over in the New Year. Regardless how we did in the previous year, we are now reset to zero. In reality, the concept of starting over in the New Year is more symbolic. The reality is most of what we are doing is a continuation of things that we have been working on for some months. We have or should have robust pipelines that we have been developing over the past months. We should have deals we are working, moving the customer through their buying cycle. Symbolically, we […]