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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
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Sadly, too many managers seem to mindlessly echo the same meaningless mantra from some hopelessly outdated sales manager playbook.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, […]
Sales Is Simple, Buying Isn’t!
I succumbed to a certain amount of narcissism (as I often do) in my post: Sales Is Simple, Simple Is Not Easy. The problem with my post, as accurate as it may have been, is that I did what too many of us do, focusing on ourselves–sales people, sales leaders, and selling. We all do that, we focus on what we do. We get into conversations about how we do what we do better. I don’t want to dismiss those conversations, they are important. But starting with what we do is the wrong starting point. We always have to start […]
What If We Talked About Our Customers?
Recently, the CEO of a company shared the agenda for his management offsite meeting. Agenda: – Review key metrics (30 min) – Discuss service growth plan (30 min) – Discuss 2020 product vision (30 min) – Discuss pricing / packaging (6 hours) 😂 – Harbor boat ride (90 minutes) I see dozens of these every year. Some for meetings I’ve been invited to participate in, some from my coaching clients. They’re not much different than the one outlined above. Yes, some of the specifics are different, but generally, they focus on a lot of internal business topics. The one thing […]
Do We Need Sales People Any Longer?
Recently, I was at a meeting hosted by my friends at Gartner. Scott Gillum made a provocative suggestion, “Do we need outbound sales any longer?” He followed that with a post. As I reflected on the question, I think we can only discover the answer by changing the question, “Why do customers need sales people any more?” Increasingly, the answer appears to be “They don’t!” We see all sorts of evidence supporting this. Customers are relying, increasingly, on other sources of information. They have solution provider web sites, influencers, referral sources, and other sorts of channels to learn about new […]
Understanding Leverage
Leverage is an important concept in business, sales, and marketing. Unfortunately, we spend too little time understanding leverage and identifying leverage opportunities in coaching and developing our people. Perhaps, our aversion to leverage is the negative connotations of the word. Too often, it’s construed as using some sort of manipulation or unfair/unethical tactics. This use of leverage is clearly wrong and seldom produces sustainable results. In this discussion of leverage, I’d like to focus on “How do we identify and prioritize those things that have the greatest impact on our results or our abilities to achieve our goals?” One of […]