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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
Sales Coaching, One Size Never Fits All!
Too often, our sales coaching, if we do it, really misses the mark. We tend to look at things the same way, coaching our people the same way–when what they really need may be very different. Let me use an example. It is actually based on a real customer situation, but provides a great illustration of how our coaching can go off target. Let’s imagine we are looking at improving the performance of two of our sales people. As we look at their pipelines, we find similarities. Each has a quota of $5M. Their pipelines are each about $10M, and […]
“I Don’t Do Templates!”
Recently, I met with a group of great sales executives. They were looking to raise the bar on performance, driving growth. We talked about a number of things, I was trying to understand what they had in place, the challenges they had, and their execution discipline. They had invested a huge amount in very powerful training and tools for the sales people. If people were using the training and tools, their performance should have been much better. As we discussed the situation and looked at the data, it turned out people weren’t using the training or tools that had been […]
Please Hire My Solution
Think of the last time you were looking for a job, or being interviewed for a position you really wanted. What did you do to present yourself most positively and get selected over those competing for the role? You probably: Did your homework, researching the company and the people you would be speaking to. Talked to other people in the company or who had worked for the company to get insight about the company, expectations, how they worked, what their challenges are. You’ve taken time to understand the job description, matching your capabilities to their needs, requirements, priorities. Prepared for […]
Sales Performance Improvement, Where To Start
I wrote, “Improving Sales Performance Without Changing How You Sell.” Readers started responding, “This is great, where do we start?” Here are some thoughts: “One size fits all:” Too often, we have a “one size fits all” approach to performance improvement. We focus on one thing, for example prospecting or pipeline coverage, and inflict this on the entire organization. Yet each person is different, as a result we may be doing the wrong thing with some, or may not be as impactful as we might be. For example, we may have high performers who have a great prospecting cadence and […]
The Power Of “Doing Things With…..”
Words are important, with the change of a single word, we often change our mindset, thinking about things differently, acting/behaving very differently. As sales people, we tend to talk about working with our customers. We use language like: “Doing something for them….,” Alternatively, “Doing things to them…..” As managers, we speak about our people in similar ways, we do something for or to them. Even though our intent may be to be helpful or to create value this wording focuses us on our own behaviors and actions, often forgetting the customer or sales person we are trying to engage. Stated […]
Insight Is Always Contextual!
HBR recently published an article, “Why ‘Tell Them Something They Don’t Know’ Is Bad Advice In B2B Sales.” The title is very “clickbaity,” upon reading it, the theme was very different, though perhaps not well explained. I don’t think anyone would argue, insight is important. It’s key to capturing the attention and imaginations of our prospects and customers. If I look at much of the prospecting email or calls I receive, clearly the marketing and sales enablement people have read the same books–they are trying to engage me with insight. But……. (You have to know there is a but) Too […]