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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 Missing Link In Sales Performance
Every sales executive is constantly struggling to improve the performance of their organizations. The data on percent of sales people achieving their goals, percent of companies making plan, and so forth is appalling. Millions of person hours are spent in trying to understand how to drive sales performance. Billions are spent on tools, training, consulting services all focused on improving the performance of sales people. In virtually every discussion, every popular blog post, the focus of all sales performance initiatives is the sales person. Are we getting the right people? Are we developing the right skills? Do they have the […]
The Buying Process, It Only Happens 1 Time!
Customers struggle with buying. There’s a huge amount of data indicating the majority of customer buying processes end in no decision made. There a number of reasons this occurs, shift is priorities, lack or urgency/attention, fear of change, costs, and so on. One of the major reasons is customers simply struggle with the buying process itself. When you think about it, with the exception of procurement professionals, and with the exception of things we buy frequently–for example toilet paper for the bathrooms, the buying process only happens once. Since most of what we buy only happens once, particularly in a […]
Cutting Sales Expense
Recently, I got a call. When I filter out all the prospecting calls, usually when people call me, it’s a CEO, VP of Sales/Marketing, or someone in the sales organization. This call was from the Controller of a relatively large organization. He had been chartered by top management to look at their sales organization. It wasn’t meeting it’s goals, so he was doing an audit. He had stumbled across some of my articles, wanting an outside opinion, he called me. Without giving me any background, his first question was, “How do I chop sales expense? What should the right level […]
Sales Manager Enablement
Thanks to people like Mike Kunkle, Tamara Schenk, Jason Jordan, Mike Weinberg, and others; the importance of Front Line Sales Manager Enablement is getting some visibility–though still not enough. As they discuss and I’ve discussed in past posts and Sales Manager Survival Guide, the single biggest lever on front line sales performance is the Front Line Sales Manager. It’s the FLSM that provides the day to day support, coaching, reinforcement, and leadership to maximize the performance of each person on their team. Without their continued reinforcement of training, systems, tools, programs–most of our sales enablement initiatives would be unsustainable. We […]
Teaching Sales People To Lie….
Just when you think you have seen the very worst prospecting email ever, you get one that takes you to new lows! I opened my email today and read: “Hello Dave, It has been some time since we last spoke, let alone worked together. The fault of this is mostly mine. However I want to make up for my time of neglect and reach out to you today to ask you a simple question. Do you want to continue to hear from me?” There is so much wrong in these four sentences, not to mention the several hundred words that […]
You Get What You Measure/Compensate For!
It’s an age old adage, “You get what you measure and compensate for.” If it were true, why do we have such a gap in sales quota performance? We’re measuring it, we’re tracking it, but the majority of sales people aren’t achieving their goals. There are a lot of things that impact quota performance, but I suspect a large part of the challenge are the other things we measure, hold people accountable for, even compensate at some level. To often these are activity metrics which desk bound managers track, beating the crap out of those who don’t achieve them, Too […]