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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
Learning From Our Failures
As 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, […]
Sales Pipeline, Quantity Or Quality?
You 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 […]
“I Don’t Have Time To Coach/Do Reviews!”
I sit with management teams discussing Sales Execution Discipline and the importance of a regular coaching and review cadence. Inevitably, during the discussion, one manager has the courage to say what everyone else is thinking: “How do I find the time to do this? I’m just so busy, I don’t have the time to sit down with my people to do these reviews and coach them!” I hear the frustration in their voices, they know they should be doing this, most want to do it, but they are so busy, finding the time to do these on a consistent basis […]
I Have A Problem With “Storytelling”
Storytelling seems to have come into fashion over the past few years. Too often, we have tried to overwhelm our customers with logic, data, and facts; expecting everyone to respond as Dr. Spock did in the old Star Trek series. While we have known we need to make an emotional connection, too often, we still focus on, “just the facts.” Ever since I’ve been in sales, which has been a few years, I’ve known the maxim,”People decide with their hearts, they rationalize their decision in their minds.” Yet we continue to dump data, facts, logic in our conversations with them, […]
The Fastest Way To Fix Sales Performance
Hundreds of pundits, thousands of articles, hundreds of books, hundreds/thousands of sales/marketing automation suppliers purport to have their miracle cures to fixing sales performance. Somehow the miracle cures seem to be: “Just train your people to do these 3 things….” “Do this one thing…..” “Implement this new technology….” “You just need to prospect….” …..and on and on and on….. Don’t get me wrong, many of these things are important and can contribute in big ways to improving sales performance. My own company, helps our clients in many of these areas, whether it’s new processes, methodologies, restructuring, better articulating value. Any […]
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 […]