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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
Hiring For “Caring”
My good friend, Buck McGugan, and I were having a conversation about sales performance. We were talking about what separates consistent high performers from everyone else. There were the usual competencies, we tend to think about–curiosity, business acumen, comfort with talking with money, resilience, mindset, and so forth. But then we started talking about “Caring.” All of a sudden, at the core of sales performance is this thing called caring. We started talking about what this really means, discovering it has many dimensions: Do you care about your customer? For too many sales people, our “caring” for the customer is […]
“What’s Next?” The Need For Specificity
I spend a lot of time in reviews of all sorts. They could be deal/opportunity reviews, territory, account, call, pipeline, forecast reviews. Some are performance reviews. Some are internal projects. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a broken record in the reviews. Inevitably, at some point, I always ask the same question, “What’s next?” I’m trying to understand what their action plan is, what they are doing to move the opportunity forward, to grow their share of account/territory, and so forth. I want to understand the most important things that need to be done to achieve their objective. The responses to […]
Leveraging Pipeline Metrics
I’m surprising myself, I never thought I’d have to write an article about pipeline metrics. After all, the pipeline has been fundamental to professional selling since the very first sales transaction. Sure, everyone will give lip service about the importance of the pipeline, but, I always ask, “Show my your pipeline and how you use it as a tool in managing your own performance.” Inevitably, there is a lot of hand waving and excuses. Often I hear, “Dave, can you give me a couple of weeks…..” This isn’t just limited to sales people, surprisingly, managers are often clueless, as well. […]
Challenging Our Customers’ Status Quo
We all know to acquire a new customer, we need to incite them to change, to get them to think differently about their business. Without this, they have no need to buy whatever it is we sell. Most of the time, sadly, sales people are in react mode. The customer has already decided to change, they’ve scoped their problem, determined their needs, and are on a path to solve the problem. And at some point in their buying process, we try to get them to go on the journey with us. Sometimes, we get into an account early, we actually […]
Our ABM “Hunting License”
I’ve never been comfortable about the hunter/farmer notions around selling. I’ve always maintained every sales person is a hunter. If you aren’t, you don’t belong in sales. We tend to think of farmers as the account managers, those who think their job is to “protect and defend,” (apologies to many of our police forces). They are driven not to rock the boat, to make sure our customers are happy, to answer their questions, to make sure that we retained them, getting that coveted annual renewal. If we could, we would expand, we’d grow our users, we’d upsell, adding more products, […]
High Performers Spend Their Time Differently
Before reading this post, think about the following quote from Abraham Lincoln: If I have 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first 4 hours sharpening the axe. I’ve had the great privilege of coaching/advising one of the highest performance sales teams I’ve ever worked with. They are led by a great manager who has built a talented team. One of the great things about working with a team like this is they execute in a very disciplined way. This team has been using our Sales Execution Framework (SEF) as the cornerstone to their sales execution strategy. […]