Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Recently, I was speaking to a number of sales execs. We were talking about how to improve the performance of their teams. One manager in frustration said: “I’m drowning in reviews, it seems I spend all my time in deal, account, pipeline, forecast, prospecting, and other reviews. And I’m falling further behind, I feel I have to review every deal, every account, everything—I can’t possibly do it! I feel so out of control!” This broke the dam in the conversation with this management team, all jumped in stating that they felt out of control, they didn’t know what was going […]
Read MoreI’ve been writing a lot about our Sales Execution Framework and a “Back To Basics” approach to sales management and selling. These articles have generated some interesting calls and reactions. A lot of the discussion has been around sales training programs, new approaches, or new tools that companies have implemented–or tried to implement. I had a tough conversation with the EVP of Sales of a mid sized company. He was angry and declared he would never invest in sales training again. He said, “Over the past several years, we’ve invested $100’s of thousands in training our people on new sales […]
Read MoreIt’s been a while since I’ve published one of these. The purpose of the “Bits and Pieces series is to point you to outstanding books, events, podcasts, and other resources. I won’t do reviews of the materials, at most a comment. Please trust that if I put it on this list, I think the work is outstanding and worth your time. The UnAmerican Dream, Carlos Hidalgo. This is a stunning book on Carlo’s personal journey to find sanity in his life and to focus on those things that are most important and drive meaning in one’s life. Carlos is a […]
Read MoreAs much as we want to, and should, focus on our sales successes, a large part of sales has to do with failure. We win some, we will always lose some. We try a certain approach, say a prospecting program, or a new sales initiative, or a deal strategy. In the “old days,” we used to do win/loss reviews. They don’t really seem to be part of the vocabulary of most sales managers. Most sales people don’t seem to take the time to reflect on failures to learn from them. It seems the only time we look at our failures, […]
Read MoreYou probably think this is a trick question, the answer is obvious, isn’t it? Be careful before you respond too quickly…… Now, I’ve got you worried and wondering, particularly long time readers. Many of you would say, Quality. You would be partly right. “Aha,” you think, “It’s both!” You would be partly right. Now you are probably thoroughly confused. Let me add to the confusion. I look at hundreds of pipelines every year. Based on the majority of those pipelines, one would think the obvious answer is “Quantity!” The mantra of too many managers is, “Fill your pipelines, you need […]
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