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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
The Unintended Consequences Of “Making It About The Numbers”
I wrote, The Number Are, Well, Just Numbers. It stirred up a lot of discussion and one observation from Gordon Hogg, was both amusing and illuminating: “It’s the Cobra Effect! India’s colonial governor put a bounty on cobras to stop snake bites. Dead cobras came in but snake bites persisted. People started breeding cobras to kill for the bounty.” I don’t know it it’s a true story, but it points out the unintended consequences of some of the metrics we put in place. We have to think about, “What behaviors are we driving–are those the behaviors we really want to […]
The Numbers Are, Well, Just Numbers….
Business people, particularly sales, are obsessed with numbers. We measure everything, we scorecard everything. Revenue, orders, growth, margin, share, performance against plan, performance against prior periods, pipeline metrics, calls made, meetings held, demos conducted, proposals submitted, wins/losses, expenses/budget, CPOD, people hired, turnover (voluntary/involuntary), performance in customers (e.g. major accounts), performance in market sectors, performance by product line, performance in geographic region/territory, customer satisfaction/NPS, customer acquisition cost, new customer acquisition, retention, churn, renewal, open rates, click throughs, forwards, bounce rates…… Differing segments have specialized terminology for many of these metrics. For example XaaS oriented businesses have a propensity to endless acronyms […]
The Servant Sales Person
Yeah, I know what the immediate reaction to the title of this post will be….. “But Dave, we’re slaves to our managers and our companies………!” I get it, I’m talking about something different, but if your managers are treating you like slaves, gently remind them the Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect on January 1, 1863 (for non US readers, I’ll have to do some research). What I’m focusing on is the application of the principles of Servant Leadership to how we work with our customers. Underlying the concept of servant or transformational leadership are roughly 10 principles: Listening Empathy […]
Can You Make A Sales Call Without Talking About Your Product?
Imagine you have an appointment with your ideal customer. The only constraint is that you can’t talk about your product. Could you make the call? What would it look like? I suppose you could talk about the weather, exchange chit chat about the World Cup, perhaps the latest baseball games or cricket matches. But that wouldn’t be very satisfying to you or the customer. It probably would be a very short meeting, because your ideal customer probably doesn’t like to have her time wasted. What could you possible talk about that would be a good use of the customer’s time? […]
The Decline Of Corporate Culture
Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch….” We all know how important culture is in aligning everyone in the organization and driving high performance. Company cultures are built on a common set of values and beliefs. They tend to focus on: Who we are, as an organization. Why we exist. What we believe. What our values are. What we want to stand for–to our employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and communities. What our common purpose is and how we remain purposeful. Corporate culture tend not to describe what we make or sell. In start-ups or small organizations, the culture […]
The Power Of The Discovery Process
There are two fundamentals to maximizing your ability to win a deal–unfortunately, both tend to be executed very poorly. The first is Qualification, or as I like to call it, Disqualification. This focuses us on pursuing the right deals with customers that are committed to changing. The second is the Discovery Process. Too often, sales people skip right over this, going straight to pitching their products/solutions. We see day in sales people’s clumsy outreach to us. Whether in an email or a bad prospecting call, most skip over qualifying and understanding what our needs/interests might be–immediately pitching their products. The […]