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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
Bad Advice: Focus Your Coaching On Your Top Performers!
I just read some really bad advice from a really smart individual, “Managers spend too much time on their bottom performers, they need to focus on their top and middle performers.” The explanation went on that time invested in bottom performers wouldn’t result in substantive performance improvement, the equivalent time spent with our top performers produces more results. On the surface this makes sense, it’s easy to jump on that bandwagon. But in reality, it’s actually pretty bad advice. Before diving into this, I do have to admit, I’m probably taking a lot of what this individual was saying, out […]
Leadership And Empathy
Surprisingly, one of the characteristics I see too many managers lacking is empathy. One would think otherwise, after all, most sales managers have been sales people at some point in their career. We would think these managers would have deep understanding of the challenges sales people face every day. Perhaps there’s a switch, of some sort, that causes individuals to forget what it means to sell in today’s environment. Perhaps it’s the seduction of sitting behind a screen, pouring through endless amounts of data, trying to find the magic answer to driving sales performance (the answers aren’t there–stop looking, though […]
Think It’s Hard To Sell, It’s Harder To Buy!
One of my biggest weaknesses is my impatience. I do all sorts of things to control it, or at least mask it. I sit on my hands, bite my tongue, count to 1000 then start over again. Sometimes it’s a losing battle with myself. Recently, I was sitting with a group of sales people. It was a pretty large group of all different ages. One person started talking about how difficult it is to sell. Everyone piled on, whining about the difficulties they faced (you can see me betraying my impatience with the choice of words). The complaints were the […]
Trust, Your Commission Plan, Making Money
I’m ashamed to admit it, every once in a while I get sucked into mind numbing discussions on LinkedIn. This one was posed by an individual pretending to want to become a “trusted advisor” to his customers. He posed a scenario, “I can propose A to my customer and this is my commission. If I propose B to my customer, my commission is more. B is a better solution, but I’m afraid my customer will think I’m being deceptive since I’m getting paid more for it….” The conversation devolved, for the most part, from there with people discussing various alternatives, […]
Principle Based Selling!
Are you training and coaching your people “principle based selling?” No I’m not announcing a new sales methodology or trying to infringe on a few companies calling their methods “Principle Based Selling.” We often use the word principle to describe values we hold, for example integrity, honesty, respect for others. Those are important, but not the subject of this post. What I’m referring to when I use the term “principle based selling,” I’m focused on identifying the fundamental things that drive sales success for your organization. Do your people understand those base principles, can they leverage them in situations they […]
“Amping Up” Your Pipeline Reviews
Managers spend an inordinate amount of time in pipeline reviews. Largely, I think this is the result of lack of clarity of what they want to accomplish in pipeline reviews or too great a focus on the numbers and not what produces the numbers. (but these are topics for other articles.) Probably 95% of all pipeline reviews I sit in are wasted efforts. The manager will start reviewing the pipeline, immediately finding a deal that catches her eye, deciding to deep dive into that. Guess what, all of a sudden the pipeline review has become a deal review! The conversation […]