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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 Crisis In Sales Performance
Whatever way you look at it, we are facing a crisis in sales performance. The data is everywhere-quantitatively and qualitatively. Last week in Dreamforce 16, there was a lot of discussion about “time available for selling.” Data points being tossed around showed time available for selling plummeting–in most cases less than 30%, in many far less than that. In some of our own client work we are seeing ranges as low as 10-20%. CEB data shows as much of stalled/lost deals is do to internal organizational complexity. Stated differently, getting things done internally adversely impacts people’s ability to focus on […]
Are You Obsessing Over Your Front Line Managers?
There are endless discussions about sales people and their performance. Thousands of blog posts with hints, tips, instructions focused on sales people, whether SDR’s or Corporate Account Managers. Hundreds of books, thousands of webinars and training programs all focus on the sales person. Billions are spent every year in training and tools to help make sales people more effective, efficient, and productive. In some sense, this focus makes sense. It is these front line individuals that produce the results, it’s these people who are accountable for finding and closing deals at a level sufficient to make the business plan. But […]
When Less Is More!
We have a complexity crisis in our organizations. There is no place where it hits harder than in the sales organization. Just think of what sales people face every day: They have the complexity of working with their customers–each struggling with and managing their own complexity. Multiply that by the number of customers, deals, opportunities they are working on. Each one is different, how things get done within each organization and each deal is different. It’s the sales person’s responsibility to manage that, helping the customer manage their own problem solving/buying process to make a decision. They have the complexity […]
Training Our Customers To Want The 57%!
There’s so much misunderstanding about the data point published by CEB a number of years ago, “Customers are 57% of the way through their buying journey before engaging sales.” Other research has this “engagement point” anywhere between 57-92%. The basic premise is the massive amount of digital information enables of customers to do research on the web results in their not engaging sales until the are 57% of the way through their buying process. It makes sense. Just for the convenience factor alone. Customers don’t have to remember who a sales person is, or even who suppliers of certain solutions […]
Focus On Your People’s Strengths, Not Their Weaknesses???
There are a number of thoughtful articles suggesting we get better results in developing our people by focusing on their developing their strengths, not “fixing” them, or criticizing their weaknesses. A recent HBR article, Developing Employees’ Strengths Boosts Sales, Profit, and Engagement, presents compelling data about organizations focusing on strengths based interventions (I guess that’s HBR speak for coaching). In general, I think it’s sound advice. Intuitively, it’s easy to see how you get employees enthusiastic and engaged in improving the things they do well. At a macro level, if we look across large organizations, the more people do what […]
#First Seven Jobs With Pat O’Brien
There’s a series going around the web about people’s First Seven Jobs. It’s been fun and fascinating to see the very first jobs people held. There’s a diverse selection of people’s first seven jobs here, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Keenan. I jumped onto the bandwagon with my first 7 jobs. In the comments, you can also see Hank Barnes’ first seven. It’s actually a huge amount of fun–first thinking about your own, reflecting on what they meant to you (privately) and seeing others’ experience. Consequently, I’ve invited a huge number of people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations, to […]