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
What If We Kept “Target Close Date” Sacred?
Just finished one of those “aha” conversations with a client. Thought I would share the concepts with you. One of the things I pay a lot of attention to, as I review pipelines or deal strategies, is the Target Close Date, and how many times that date has been changed. I believe sales people should do everything possible to: Identify the most realistic target close date possible.Do everything possible to keep that date sacred. Sadly, most target close dates seem to be unrealistic and meaningless. They are driven by what a sales person (or their manager) wants or needs, but […]
“They Aren’t Using CRM!!!”
The first time a sales manager made this statement to me, in frustration, was about 20 years ago. Since then, it’s become the common complaint I hear from managers (If I had a nickel for every time…….) It’s what happens next that explains a large part of the problem, I always ask, “Let’s sign onto your CRM system and take a look at what’s going on…..” You can probably guess what happens. These managers who expect their people to use CRM struggle in using CRM. If they are complaining about the lack of utilization, one would expect they can show […]
The Pipeline Review
I was meeting with a client, we were doing the first pipeline review as part of their implementation of the Sales Execution Framework. Pipeline reviews are a great starting point for the process, a good pipeline review helps identify and isolate potential challenges as well as the performance leverage points. The client was a very large company, the current pipeline had thousands of opportunities. They had always done pipeline reviews—I suspect a number of the managers were thinking, “Why are we doing this, we do them all the time–isn’t there a better way to identify our performance leverage points?” But […]
Are Sales People “Coin Operated?
We are facing a crisis in sales retention. Average tenure for sales people and managers has plummeted to 16.5 months. As I speak to sales executives and managers about the reasons for the increasing voluntary turnover, too often, they respond, “It’s all about compensation! Sales people are coin operated, if they have the opportunity to make more money some place else, they will go after that opportunity.” But the data shows a completely different picture. In a Gartner survey of over 200 sales people, the following shows the top 10 reasons about why sales people leave. Compensation is the leading […]
The “Did I Manifesto”
My friend, Kevin Dorsey, wrote a fantastic piece on LinkedIn. Be sure to read it. Kevin outlines a number of important things, but underlying these in the importance of periodic self reflection. For many, we are beginning a new quarter. It’s always a good time to go through a quick mental checklist about what we have done and not done in, for example, the past quarter. Too often, we are consumed with our day to day activities, we lose site of what we are doing and where we are going. We end up reacting to the things that impact us […]
We Don’t Lose Because Of What We Sell!
Sit down with most sales people doing a loss review. The majority of the reasons cited for losing are: Price Price Product deficiencies Restrictions in how we do business, contracts, etc. Price According to sales people, why we lose has little to do with our own performance. Ask customers why they chose to buy, or even why they couldn’t make a buying decision, the responses are seldom about the product or their confidence in the product/solution. Yeah, I know I will be deluged with emails and comments saying I’m wrong with endless amounts of “evidence” that “If we just had […]