Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
We Get Sales Math Wrong! The Magic Is In The Numerator!
My apologies, I’m doing a series of rants that are something akin to David Letterman’s Stupid Pet Tricks. Instead these posts are about Stupid Sales Management/Marketing/Sales Tricks. Sales and marketing are among the most measured functions around. But having these metrics, knowing what they mean, developing and executing plans to improve performance and knowing what to do about them are not well understood. Too often, we leap to the stupid answer, not to the answers that really turn the dials on performance. Here are some examples, while they may seem laughable, they are real. I’m not smart enough to make […]
Driving “Volume,” Are We Letting Form Triumph Over Substance?
John Gardner’s outstanding book, “EXCELLENCE,” published in 1961 has one line that has stuck with me since I read the book in college, “Do not let form triumph over substance.” I think it’s important to reflect on this as we think about our customer engagement and our scaling strategies. If we consider what customers are saying, customers want, in fact are hungry for substance. They need help achieving their goals. They want sales people who understand them, their businesses, their markets, their competition. They want sales people who can teach them how to improve, who can challenge their thinking, who […]
How Do We Broaden Our Thinking About Our Deal Strategies?
This morning, I was conducting a deal review with a very experienced sales person. It was like many other reviews and the sales person was falling into the same trap that I see replicated too many times with too many sales people. This trap is deceptive, seemingly it narrows our focus on what the customer is trying to achieve and how we respond, but too often, it limits our ability to compete and differentiate ourselves. In this review, the sales person said, “there are two driving issues, all we have to do is address those and we win the deal.” […]
Time, Our Scarcest Resource
We all know the single thing we cannot recover is time. Once it’s passed, we can never recover it. Most everything else, we do, we can recover from. We can change our strategy if things aren’t going right, we can find new customers if we don’t have enough deals to make our number, we can change our proposal if customers don’t like what we’ve proposed, we can change our jobs, if we accepted a role we end up not being well suited for. However, I’m always amazed with the casualness with which we treat our time. There are all sorts […]
The “Last Mile” In Selling
In the old days of telecom, the days when telecom was dominated by landlines, one of the most important strategies had to do with the “last mile.” (Actually, much of the conversation around net-neutrality is today’s version of the last mile.) The “last mile” was more figurative than literal, but it focused on who controlled the access to the home or business. Whatever service provider that owned that “last mile” relationship really controlled the majority of the revenue opportunity from the customer. There’s a similar concept in selling. As we look at many of our sale enablement strategies, it seems […]
Our Customers Are Doing Their Homework
Every three years, I go through the same cycle. My car lease comes to an end. Every three years, the same thing happens; about 6 months before the lease end, the dealer(s) start to contact me. It’s always with an offer, “We can let you out of the lease early and get you into the latest model of your current car…..” I’ve just gotten into that 6 month window. I’ve gotten two outreaches, the first from the dealer I bought the car from, the second from a deal where I happened to have the car serviced once. Both had the […]