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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
What About Sales Person Retention?
Retention is a hot topic–customer retention that is. We’ve all seen data around customer acquisition costs. Basically, the cost of acquiring new customers is several time higher than the cost of retaining and growing existing customers. The whole subscription model, on which all SaaS and XaaS companies are built has customer retention as a fundamental to the success of the business model. All the discussion around ABM/ABS/ABE is focused on retaining and growing our most important accounts. Makes sense! But how come we don’t see similar focus on Sales Person Retention? A recent study from Glassdoor, shows on average, an […]
Complacency
I struggled with the title of this post, wanting something more eye catching, provocative, perhaps a little less negative. Complacency is an ugly word. No one likes to be accused of being complacent. Complacency is sometimes associated with laziness, though some of the most complacent organizations I encounter are far from “lazy,” but “crazy-busy” with activity. Reflecting for a few moments, I don’t think any individual or company sets out to be complacent. Instead, we are seduced into complacency. Ironically, the greatest seductress for complacency is success! When we are successful, we want to keep going. We keep doing what […]
“A Sales Person By Any Other Name Is Still A ……..”
In Act 2, Scene 2, of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says: “What is in a name? That which we call a rose…By any other name, would smell as sweet” Which brings me to the discussion I hear too often, “What if we called sales people something other than a sales person?” We see it every day with the proliferation of terms we use for sales people: Relationship managers, Trusted advisors, Account managers, Territory managers, Business developers, Retention managers, SDR, BDR, Business development consultant, Solutions advisors, Customer service reps (Yes, there are those that do provide service and others that […]
What Do You Do For Your Customers, Not What Do You Do!
The moon must be in a certain phase. All the prospecting calls I’ve been getting have been the same. After introductions, they immediately launch into, “Here’s what we do…….” I’d let the sales person finish his pitch, then reply, “I understand what your company does, but what can your company do for me and my company?” 100% of the time (OK, the sample size was about 5 calls), the response was, “Here’s what we do….” I’d repeat my question, and they’d repeat the same answer. As I reflected on the calls, I realized they aren’t too unusual. I reflected on […]
Customers And Sales, We Need Each Other!
If I were to assess the worlds of buying and selling through much of what I read, I would come up with the conclusion that Customers and Sales people are on diverging paths, we are doing as much to minimize our interactions with each other. The Holy Grail of these diverging paths is AI–from a buyers perspective, helping us buy efficiently and intelligently. From a sellers perspective helping us sell more efficiently. Someday buyers and sellers will have their bots talking with each other, freeing human beings from the process of buying and selling. Survey after survey discuss buyer dissatisfaction […]
“Fixing The Compensation Problem…..”
I always worry when a conversation with a sales executive starts with, “We need to fix our compensation problem.” The ensuing discussion usually focuses on, “We aren’t meeting our numbers, we need to fix the compensation/commission system in order to make our numbers.” At this point in the conversation, there is an uncomfortable back and forth: Me: “Why do you think your compensation structure is the problem in achieving your numbers?” With relatively naive managers, the response is, “Well sales people are coin operated, if we want them to change what they are doing, we just need to adjust the […]