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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
Being Mentored And Mentoring
Mentoring takes all forms, some of the more unusual are the most helpful, particularly in my experience. Through my own career, I have had a number of “formal mentors.” Early in my career, in addition to great managers who coached my day to day performance, I was assigned to very senior executives in my company. We would have formal discussions, monthly, and every once in a while they would invite me to participate (most often as a fly on the wall) in key meetings they conducted. These experiences helped me learn and helped me gain broader perspectives about business. They […]
Sales Managers “Closing Business”
I was struggling to meet with a sales manager. He really wanted to talk, we had critical issues he had asked for help in addressing. He kept postponing our calls, “Dave, I’m running all out, I’ve really got to be out in the field closing business for my people…..” We finally had our meeting. I started the meeting asking, “Bill, how’d all those deals go, did you close them…..” Bill went on and on, using a lot of our meeting time, talking about the meetings and his finesse in closing deal after deal. Of course there were a few that […]
Expecting Our People To Think For Themselves
I’ve not been following my normal cadence of blog posts the past couple of weeks. Normally I publish 4-5 a week, in the past two weeks, I published about a third that number. Part of the reason is I’ve been consumed with doing my “day job,” which is helping clients drive higher levels of sales performance than they have ever experienced. But normally, that doesn’t divert me from writing, it actually gives me ideas for posts. But the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in a bit of a dark place on the “state of selling.” I’ve been obsessing with […]
Predictable Buying
We spend lots of time and money trying to create predictable revenue, increasing the predictability of our sales approaches. We constantly engineer, refine, tune and re-engineer what we do and how we engage our customers to produce POs. We optimize our efforts, looking to be as efficient as possible, achieving what we do in the fastest time and lowest cost of selling possible. And every once in a while we also look at effectiveness….. But, if we look at most data, it’s not working, or at least as well as we hope. Fewer people are achieving plan, though they are […]
“It’s Like Cheating On Your Homework, You Might Just Learn Something”
A client/friend and I had just completed a number of reviews with his team. As with most pipelines I see, many of these people’s were anemic. They just didn’t have enough opportunities to enable them to achieve their goals. Even if they won 100% of the opportunities in their pipelines, they would fall far short. We asked, “What are you going to do? How are you going to get your people to generate more opportunities?” There was a lot of hand wringing, hemming and hawing. They knew they needed to prospect, but as many of us think, it’s just such […]
Sales Is All About Relationships
Sales IS about relationships. This truism is often parroted, but too often, has many and divergent meanings. What do we mean by relationships, what are the relationships we seek to develop as sales people? There’s the old stereotype of a relationship oriented sales person, where selling is only about the relationship–usually some socially oriented relationship. This is the sales person that’s always bringing coffee, taking customers out to lunch, inviting customers to any number of events. They are the sales person that always sends your spouse and kids birthday cards (believe it or not, I still get them from sales […]