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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
“Sales People Don’t Have Time To Create Value With Customers…..”
I read a comment in a post, “Sales people don’t have time to create value with their customers anymore.” In fairness to the author, he was claiming sales is broken—it is. My knee jerk reaction was, “This is complete BS!” Upon reflecting I realized it’s true, and it’s probably an understatement. Without a doubt, sales people are busier than ever. They have too much on their plates, and keep getting more and more piled on. Sales people, just as their customers are time poor. At the same time, they are pressed by management for more volume. They blindly send hundreds […]
Getting Feedback Wrong
We know feedback is important to our own personal development. It’s how we learn and grow, it’s how we improve. All high performers (or aspiring high performers) are constantly looking for feedback. Our people need feedback as well. But too often we get feedback wrong! Here are some major ways we miss the opportunity to help our people perform better. We don’t provide any feedback. We’re too busy, we’re not involved, or we simply don’t care. This is part of your job as a manager. If you aren’t providing feedback, then you aren’t doing your job. We make it about […]
Should We Be Coaching Only To Our People’s Strengths?
Many people focus on coaching to their people’s strengths. The argument is that it’s far easier to get people to improve the things they are good at then to focus on reducing their weaknesses. To some degree, I get the argument, people are possibly more engaged because we are working at what they are good at and probably what they enjoy doing. Time to results is probably faster, because they are already strong in those areas and we are just improving it. I’ve seen some examples like, “If they aren’t good at prospecting, then don’t waste your time…..” This argues […]
Bits And Pieces, June 18, 2017
First, Happy Father’s Day to all of you who are fathers! Hope you are taking time away from work and social media to spend time with your families. Many of you know I’m just finishing the follow up book to Sales Manager Survival Guide (SMSG). Where SMSG focused on helping Front Line Sales Managers maximize individual and team performance. Sales Executive Survival Guide (SESG) will focus on the top Sales Leadership. It will help you look at the sales function, it’s fit within the enterprise, and how to drive organizational excellence. In SESG, we will be looking at how the […]
We Need More Wins!
Virtually every organization I know is struggling with making their numbers. Every sales person, manager, executive inevitably says: “We need to make our numbers, we need more wins, we need more in our pipelines!” Inevitably programs du jour are launched. Sales people are told, “Get more into your pipeline.” They’re told to prospect, we start counting prospecting conversations, and counting pipeline deals. Inevitably pipelines grow—every self respecting sales person can always get more in their pipeline. Tell me the number you want, I will make it 100% of the time–I’ll even overachieve that goal. But I may be filling my […]
The Hidden Sales Productivity Drain
Regardless your level, look at your weekly calendar. Unless you are a total dolt, I can guess what it looks like: Your time is completely filled, often with overlaps in meetings, some with multiple things scheduled at the same time. The demands on your time exceed what you can schedule—and you do a lit of shifting/juggling. Your to-do list isn’t getting shorter, in fact it’s getting longer–and you seem to be completing fewer things each week. You’ve never been busier. You may feel like you are accomplishing a lot-because of your activity levels, but at the end of the month/quarter/year, […]