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 Need To Sell Is Irrelevant To The Customer
As sales people, we are driven by our need to sell. Whether it’s the drive to win, attainment, commissions/earnings, or pressure from our managers, we have a high need to sell. Unfortunately, our need to sell is absolutely meaningless to customers. In fact, the more strongly we execute on that need, the more we alienate our customers. Regular readers know I’m prone to analogies. The analogy here is that our need to sell can be likened to pushing a rope uphill. The more we push, the less progress we make–ultimately, we have a tangled mess. But if someone’s at the […]
Freeing Up “Time To Sell” Is BS!
A friend forwarded me an article entitled, “Giving People More Time To Sell Is BS.” Intrigued, I clicked on the link. The article started with a statement to the effect of “ill informed pundits quoting data that sales people spend only 10-30% of their time F2F with customers.” I thought, “Hmm, that must be me…” I’ve used that data, but so have a lot of others. I call that TIme Available For Selling, (TAFS—just what we need, another acronym.) He went on discuss the selling distractions, arguing, “why would a sales person choose to spend their time on admin processes […]
Survey Fatigue And Customer Experience
Companies are obsessed (Hmmm, maybe not) with customer experience. Many seem to want to understand people’s customer experience–how or if they pay attention is anyone’s guess. Along with this obsession comes the obsession with measuring that customer experience. That along with technology making it easy to do surveys in real time, it seems as though almost every interaction is surveyed and measured. For example: “Thank you for buying our products, we’d like to understand your satisfaction by having you complete this customer satisfaction survey. If you complete it, you will be put in a drawing for a Starbucks card valued […]
Sales Heroics Are Actually Sales Failures!
All of us revel in stories of the deal where we took dramatic actions and ultimately won–hopefully not by discounting. We get an Adrenalin rush in talking about this things that we did to pull the opportunity from the ashes and into the victory column. When we get together with our colleagues, over beer, we seek to outdo each other in stories about our heroics. I’d be less than honest, if I didn’t admit to doing the same. These stories are fun, we enjoy sharing them and laughing. But the reality is that sales heroics represent a failure on our […]
Beware Of “Experts” Sharing Data…..
I guess part of being perceived as being an expert is sharing data and research—all of which supports the conclusions you want people to reach. Don’t get me wrong, we share data on the results we’ve produced, we share data on research we have conducted. But we are careful to position the context of that data and how it might be interpreted. But too often, we consciously or unconsciously, we “lie with statistics.” I read an interesting article in Forbes. Largely, I agree with the author, but he cited an example that is very misleading. I’m certain there was no […]
Sales Manager, Are You Doing Your Job?
Monthly, I get into discussions with well intended sales managers–all are struggling, all are looking for help. They are trying to do their jobs, but in most cases they don’t understand their jobs, so it’s no wonder they are struggling. Conversations go something like the conversation I had several weeks ago with “Bob.” Bob is a front line sales manager (FLSM) for a large technology company. He has had a successful sales career and has been a FLSM for several years. He’s making his numbers, but barely, he laugh’s, saying, “It’s always at 11:59 PM on the last day of […]