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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
Where Did That Close Date Come From?
Bob Apollo recently wrote a great piece, “Where Did That Close Date Come From?” His discussion focused on improving forecast accuracy. It provoked me to extend the discussion. Target close date and maintaining the accuracy of those close dates is important. Most of the time, the way sales people establish the target close date is one of the following ways: Wild ass guesses driven by wishful thinking. A date picked to keep their managers of their backs. In reviewing deals or pipelines, one of the things I often look at is the history of changes in target close dates. One […]
“The Forecast Meeting”
A friend and I were sharing our experiences in forecast meetings. Each of us has participated in hundreds of these, there seems to be a consistent pattern: Sales Manager: “Are the deals you’ve committed to the forecast going to come in as forecast?” Sales Person: “Sorry boss, this $1M (fill in your amount) deal with X corporation is going to fall out….” Sales Manager: “We need to backfill that $1M, we have to make the number, what do you have to backfill the $1M you just de committed to?” Sales Person: “Well boss………” Sales Manager: “We need to backfill $1M, […]
“We Need To Do More To Help Our Sales People!”
It seems everywhere I turn, there is a huge urgency around “helping” our sales people sell more. Clearly, the data on sales performance is startling, though not new. The percent of sales people meeting or exceeding their plans is declining. The percent of organizations not making their plans is staggering. Everyone is recognizing the changing customer. First they are becoming impossible to reach (perhaps an intended or unintended consequence of the deluge of prospecting emails/calls). Second, more buying decisions end in “no decision made,” so they struggle to buy. Our sales people need help in more effectively engaging these struggling […]
What’s Your One Goal For Each Person On Your Team?
Too often, as managers, if we do coach, our coaching is ineffective. One of the key reasons is that we are unfocused on what we are trying to achieve with each person. What happens is that we see skills that need to be developed, new habits that need to be solidified, behaviors we need to change. In our coaching, we try to achieve all of these things with the sales person. We may do this in a single one on one, deal review, call review, or whatever conversation we have. Our intentions are good, we are trying to help our […]
Putting Yourself In Your Customers’ Shoes
As sales people, we need to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. Organizationally, we need to understand their business, markets, industry, key strategies/drivers, key challenges, how things get done within the company, and more. Individually, we need to understand what makes them tick, what they worry about, what their personal goals/ambitions are, how they are measured, how they spend their days, and more. The better we are at connecting with them–where they are, the more effective we will be in identifying how our products and solutions might help them achieve their goals. We want to be able to mirror their […]
Changing Channel Dynamics, Driving Channel Success In The Face Of Changing Customers
Channels have always been a critical part of most organizations’ Go To Customer strategies. They are critical to extending our coverage of the market, accessing markets with specialized expertise, and in helping provide our customers more complete solutions. Managing channels for optimum performance in the face of rapidly changing buying processes and cloud based solutions creates challenges neither suppliers nor channel players have faced in the past. For example, many of the IT centric products and services are seeing radically changing buying–shifting out of IT into end users. This drives a change in the channel, helping them shift their approaches […]