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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
Thinking About Sales Performance — That Is Sales Management Incompetence
I’m a huge fan of the research done by the folks at CSO Insights. They are very gracious in sharing their research with me—Thank you! I was just reading their newly released 2018-2019 Sales Performance Report. The very first set of data, in a packed report, fascinated me. It was a comparison of Plan vs Quota Attainment: 2018 SRP Metrics Performance Level 1 Performance Level 2 Performance Level 3 Overall Plan Attainment 92.9% 93.8% 95.0% Quota Attainment 45.8% 54.0% 60.7% Some quick explanatory notes. The Performance Levels represent the “bell curve” of sales organizational performance. Performance Level 1 represents 20.8% […]
Rethinking The Sales And Marketing Organization
We continue to organize our sales and marketing initiatives around what makes us more efficient or old views of how customers buy. Classically, marketing’s focus is on creating interest and awareness, then driving demand. The work toward MQLs, turning them over to sales, hopefully as SALs, saying “Good luck and godspeed!, we caught ’em, you skin ’em.” Sales picks up the process, SDRs call to qualify the opportunity, they hand the lead to an account manager who gets more information, the customer is handed over to a pre-sales person for a demo, then someone else try to close them. The […]
Aligning With The Customer Buying Journey
We know we have to align our marketing and sales processes with the customer buying journey. That used to be simple when we considered the buying journey to be relatively linear. However, current Gartner research shows a completely different picture of the customer buying journey, one that can only be characterized as “Chaotic.” How do we deal with the chaotic buying journey? Particularly, when this journey is unique for each customer and dynamic? How do we layer the fact that during this journey, customers will seek information through multiple channels, simultaneously? Some posit, we have to provide very granular, relevant […]
Talent Still Matters!
Developing any high performance sales team starts with talent. If you have the wrong people, no tools, processes, programs, training in the world will make up for it. Yet, too often, managers treat this issue too cavalierly. I constantly see: Sloppy approaches to recruiting, relying more on “chemistry,” and out of date job descriptions, rather than having a rich competency model for the “ideal candidate.” Rushing to fill vacant positions, rather than taking the time to find the right person. Failing to put strong onboarding programs in place–and focusing those programs exclusively on product training. Creating a high churn organization, […]
“Sales Is Just Another Information Delivery Channel”
In the distant past, sales people were a primary channel for customer for educating customers about solutions and providing information. Customers had few convenient channels to learn about solutions and new approaches to their business. Trade shows, magazines, meeting with peers also provided some of this information, but sales people had always been critical for information delivery. Fast forward to today, customers have many sources of information about solutions. Company web sites, industry web sites, peer discussion groups, other web based and traditional channels have become key sources of information for prospects and buyers. Data shows customers relatively agnostic about […]
The “Chaotic” Buying Process
We know the importance of the marketing and sales process. It provides us a structured, disciplined approach to engaging our buyers. In theory, it should help us help the customer in navigating their buying process. Sounds good, what could be simpler–start at the beginning, go step by step through each stage, reach the end when the customer does, get an order, move on. The problem is, the customer buying process is not a structured, linear process. In fact, it could be described as chaotic. All of a sudden, something doesn’t make sense. We can start to see the disconnect between […]