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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
“The Right Commission Plan Will Fix Everything….”
It’s that time of year. Many senior sales execs are starting their planning for next fiscal year. Inevitably, the commission plan becomes part of the discussion. “Dave, if only we get the right commission plan, we will fix all our performance problems! Can you help?” Of course I can help, but I always ask, “What makes you think it’s the compensation plan that’s standing in the way of sales performance?” The answers are pretty predictable, vague ideas about sales people being money driven, so all we have to do is show them the path to making more money, then they […]
Discovery, What’s Your Customer Learning?
We get discovery wrong in so many ways: We fail to do discovery. We jump straight to the pitch. We ask all the questions we are supposed to ask, without knowing what they mean and why we are asking them. Or we don’t pay attention to the answers. (This is a variant of 1, but we want to make the customer think we care when all we want to do is pitch.) We make it all about ourselves (so what’s different). We use discovery to learn what it takes to win the business. You know the routine: What are your […]
Building Your Personal Brand — Again
There’s a lot of discussion about how important it is for sales people to “build their personal brands.” I’ve written about this topic several times before, even using the same title before. But it’s a topic, as much as I wish would go away, doesn’t. But what does it mean to build our personal brands? Many advocate building a massive social media presence–doing everything one can by increasing your presence in places like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social channels. Apparently, we are supposed to blog and tweet. We are supposed to be constantly involved in conversations or other […]
Customers And Rational Behaviors
Too often, I’m in reviews with sales people whining, “The customer is irrational!” They go through a litany of complaints, including: “They don’t understand our products and why they are superior…..” (Of course it’s not their job to do that.) “They keep changing their minds….” “They aren’t being logical, we’ve presented all the data/analysis, it should be obvious….” and on and on and on….. The net of it seems to be “customers are behaving irrationally when they don’t do the things we want them to do.” There’s the managerial version of the same thing, whining about their people. You know […]
Going In Circles
I had been working intensely doing some analysis for a client. My head was beginning to spin, and I needed a break. As fortune would have it, at just that moment, some poor SDR decided to call (or at least their power dialers decided to call). Normally, I don’t answer these calls, but I needed a break…… “May I speak to the person in charge of …….” said the SDR. “I suppose that would be me, I’m CEO of the company,” I replied. The SDR sounded a little disappointed, he really wanted to talk to someone in our IT department, […]
Building On Shaky Foundations
It was an interesting conversation. I was meeting with a very thoughtful sales executive. He was about to make some pretty big investments in training and in technology tools. I asked him why he was making those investments, he replied, “We really need to raise the skills and productivity of the sales people. They aren’t performing as they should be, we need to up their game.” I then asked, “Is it the absence of those specific skills and that technology that is impacting their ability to perform?” He paused, and looked at me, “What do you mean?” As we went […]