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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
Getting The Most Out Of Deal Reviews
Sales people spend a majority of their time doing deals–finding them, qualifying them, helping their customers navigate the buying process until they make a decision, then ultimately getting the order. Since this is where most of our people live their lives, it’s where sales managers should be spending a lot of time. Unfortunately, too many sales managers don’t leverage deal review for their full value. Many of the deal reviews I participate in look more like interrogations. Sales managers pummeling the sales person for data: What solution are you selling? Why do they need it? Who’s involved in the decision? […]
Buyers Aren’t Killing Sales, Sales People Are Killing Sales!
I get so weary about the endless drivel about the “Death Of Sales.” Ironically, I never see a post from customers/buyers—even procurement—about the death of sales, though I’m sure many would appreciate it (a variant of “What do you call 600 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean” joke —If you don’t know the answer, it’s “A good start!) Al the posts seem to come from sales “gurus” and technology suppliers, perhaps foreshadowing their own demise. What’s killing sales isn’t the buyer. It isn’t their ability to self educate, to engage other buyers in social conversations, or even to process […]
What If The Half Truths About Sales Were Absolutely True?
It’s not often I disagree with Anthony Iannarino’s take on things. He recently wrote an article, 10 Half Truths About Sales. I really don’t disagree with his views (perhaps this is a “Yes, and……” post). But what if we considered these to be 100% true, what does it mean for sales? The post is really reaching out to counter the dozens of ill informed posts about the “Death of Sales.” I’m always amused by these posts. They are usually written by vendors or consultants who sell to sales people. Ironically, they are foreseeing the deaths of their own businesses. Let’s […]
“We Can’t Solve Our Business Problems With Microscopes”
The single biggest challenge facing business executives in the coming years is managing complexity. As our businesses get bigger and more diverse, as our customers change and grow, as organizations become larger, more complex, as the amount of information and data grows, while our time to execute compresses, it becomes much more difficult to to manage the business. We develop models and frameworks to look at our businesses, figuring out where we need to tweak, what we need to change, how we need to focus. We take problems that are overwhelming in their complexity, breaking them down into components to […]
The Problem With Efficiency
We design our organizations to be lean mean selling machines. Each step of our sales process is optimized to maximize the results our sales people get. We recognize different skills and capabilities are needed in different stages of the sales process. Prospectors prospect, account managers account manage, product line specialists are expert in their product lines, and on and on…. Each role is precisely defined, we have the metrics to by which we constantly measure performance. We’ve worked closely with marketing, they have their lean mean marketing machine optimized to deliver just the right leads at just the right time. […]
“Just the facts, Ma’am…”
The phrase, “Just the facts, Ma’am, ” is attributed to Detective Sergeant Joe Friday (played by Jack Webb) in the series, Dragnet. (Search YouTube or some of the TV Classics channels for episodes. As a bit of trivia, he actually never said that, but it is very frequently attributed to him). Detective Joe Friday was a hard-nosed investigator, refusing to be swayed by emotion, guesses, opinions. Fortunately, his partner and foil, Officer Bill Gannon (played by Harry Morgan) tended to look at these non-factual issues. Too often, our sales efforts are focused on finding, “Just The Facts.” We search for […]