Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
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. […]
“When Do You Need A Response?”
We live in a FOMO, interrupt driven world. We are distracted by the Adrenalin rush of being busy, forgetting that we aren’t accomplishing the things we had intended to accomplish. One of the most devastating things to our goal attainment is our mistaken view of what it means to be “customer responsive.” Recently, I was watching a sales team work. They were constantly busy, but at the end of each day, as we reviewed their progress against their goals, the progress didn’t align with the activity. As we discussed what happened, these comments started showing a pattern: “A customer called […]
Sales Leadership Is About Human Leadership!
There are thousands of books and articles about selling and how to be a great sales leader–either individually as a sales person or organizationally. Most of these focus on what we should be doing–we need to be customer focused, we need to prospect , we need to have full pipelines, we need to…. We spend, as a profession, billions in training, tools, programs, to help us improve as sales leaders. We say selling is a people business, yet we focus on the mechanization of our interactions. We miss, sales leadership is really about human leadership. Whether we are serving our […]
You’re Not Ready For That Call!
Somehow, it seems that a post on preparing for sales calls/meetings would be totally unnecessary. One would hope all sales professionals would have a plan for every call, if only to manage their own time very well. When I talk to sales people about the importance of sales call/meeting planning, the responses tend to fall into two categories. The first category is “the voice of experience.” These sales people look at me, roll their eyes, saying, “You don’t understand, I’ve been selling for year, I’ve made 1000s of calls.. I know how to get it done!” The second category responds, […]
“Whose Success Was This????”
A client asked me to interview a candidate for a key sales role. The sales person had several jobs over the past 5 years, none lasting longer than 18 months. He had been in his current job for 9 months. In each role, he outlined his stellar accomplishments, his great wins, his quota over-attainment. I was suitably wowed! I dug in a little, what’s the onboarding time for each of these roles? What’s the average sales cycle for each role? The sales person wanted to impress me with his knowledge and ability to sell very complex deals. “Oh the onboarding […]