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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
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 […]
Customers Feel Value
Scott Gillum and I were having one of our usual conversations, the marketing vs. sales conversation. As usual, I thought, Scott is a wickedly smart marketing professional. Somehow those words seem like an oxymoron, but in his case it’s pure truth. During our conversation, Scott said something that stopped me for a few minutes, “Customers feel value.” I don’t know it Scott intended it that way, but I felt it at the moment he said it. And I think the ability for the customers to feel value is probably the ultimate manifestation of value creation. Think to situations where you […]
The “One Thing”
Sales people and managers struggle with achieving their goals. We have to do everything–prospect, work the deals in our pipelines, do increasing amounts of reporting, and on and on. When we struggle to achieve our goals, the answers, perhaps disguised as coaching, are to “Do More!” Usually, that means do more of everything; prospecting working the deals in our pipelines, and more reporting. Sometimes it’s “Do more of this one thing….” These days, it’s usually more prospecting, as if that’s the only answer to fixing a lean pipeline. Now here’s where it starts to get confusing, hang in there. We […]
Partners In EXCELLENCE Blog
Those of you who get blog updates from me in your email or news consolidator may have noticed some very strange behavior from my blog today. First, my apologies for any inconvenience. Second, an explanation and some reflection: This morning, part of my routine is to check the blog to make sure the latest post is published. I usually have them scheduled for publication about midnight PDT. When I looked at it this morning, all my posts had been wiped out! There are almost 2400 posts, spanning 10 years. All of them were gone. Fortunately, I’m paranoid about things like […]
Do Your Salespeople Really Understand Their Numbers?
Every year, I meet with thousands of sales people and sales managers. Inevitably the conversations focus on sales performance and achieving their goals. We try to help them understand the leverage points in achieving their goals, and how that drives their focus and activities. We start talking about the “numbers.” No, not quotas, but the leading numbers that indicate whether they are doing enough of the right things, with the right people, at the right time. In the conversations, we end up talking a lot about pipeline, prospecting, and select activity metrics. Most are very polite, as we talk about […]
The Lowest Form Of Sales Management
Sadly, too many managers seem to mindlessly echo the same meaningless mantra from some hopelessly outdated sales manager playbook. The answer to every performance issue seems to be simply, “Do more!” The “more” that’s identified is usually more of something that has worked in the past, without assessing whether it is still the right course of action. As a result, we get mindless guidance like, “Just do more prospecting,” “Just get more opportunities in your pipeline,” “Win more,” “Spend more time [doing something],” and on and on. And when those don’t work, we know the answer, “Just do more……..” Inevitably, […]