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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
In Praise Of Boring Sales Organizations
Over the last several weeks, I’ve seen a similar issue with 4 different companies. On the surface, each seemed to have a very disciplined approach to developing their teams and driving performance. Each spoke about the structured review process. They had pipeline reviews, deal reviews, 1 on 1’s, and others. I’d been asked to sit in on some of the reviews, helping the management team improve the results from these, as well as to help improve their coaching abilities. Roughly, 80% of the scheduled reviews were cancelled. Inevitably, something came up forcing the managers (mostly) and the sales people to […]
“Just Give Me The Answers!”
There’s a disturbing trend in developing the capabilities of sales people. It’s the focus on providing answers, rather than developing skills. We see this manifested in all sorts of ways: Increasing focus on scripting–whether it’s written or spoken communications. This is often cloaked in interesting ways, “Tell me the questions I should ask….,” but sales people don’t know what to do with the answers. Managers “telling” people what to do, rather than coaching them in how to figure out what to do. Training focused more on being prescriptive, than developing skills. In truth, too often, these are responses to what […]
Are You Learning Yesterday’s Skills For Tomorrow’s Buyers?
Every time I meet sales enablement and sales executives, I ask, “What are the critical skills you are focusing on training and developing your people on? The answers are varied, but generally fall into very specific, and classic selling skills: Qualifying, questioning, listening, prospecting, objection handling, closing, call planning, deal planning, account planning, time/territory management, establishing rapport, communications styles, and so on. These skills are important, in fact they are table stakes for all professional sales people. But they are yesterday’s skills and insufficient in working with tomorrow’s buyers. Going back to those conversations with sales executives, I usually follow […]
“Touching The Customer 1 Time, Annoying Her 6 More Times!”
We all know the importance of reaching out to “touch the customer.” We know it takes multiple touches across multiple channels. Some data suggests it takes as many a 15 touches to get a customer to respond. Other data shows we must spread those touches across multiple channels, for example phone (Yeah, that’s so old school but it works), email, Linkedin, etc. We know the majority of sales people give up far to early, often after the first or second attempt. But all this brings into question, “What is a touch?” My friend, Mike Webster, relayed a great story. He […]
Going Beyond The “What” Of Activity Metrics
Activity metrics are receiving lots of attention. Activity metrics can be very useful, at the same time, they can stimulate a lot of, well … wasted activity. Too often, we focus on the wrong things as we put activity metrics in place. We focus on the “what and how many,” for example, “You need to make 150 dials today,” or “You have to send out 200 prospecting emails,” As a result, the activities become “ends” in themselves, and not means to achieve certain goals. Every sales person (competent or not) should be able to achieve these goals, just find a […]
Automating Stupidity
I have a very good friend, Dr. Howard Dover. He does wickedly smart things in driving the sales curriculum at UT Dallas. Every once in a while, I get terribly frustrated and need to vent and Howard lets me vent. I was venting on the mindless focus on activity. Activity for activity sake, with no concern about the results these activities create–the goal has become activity. I read an article, “Can your sales people complete 120K activities a year?” There was some data that normal sales people are a fraction of that. These articles somehow only seem to talk about […]