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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 Leadership Dysfunction —“Super Hero” Sales Managers
My last pose in this series was Disconnected Sales Execs. This week, I continue focusing on the “Super Hero” Sales Managers. We know who these types of sales managers are: They’re the people who swoop in on deals, taking them away from the sales person, closing the deals themselves. Of the differing types of Dysfunctional Sales Managers, this is probably the worst, for a number of reasons. They don’t understand their jobs. They think it’s about closing deals–that’s the job of sales people, not sales managers. Yes, they were probably great as individual contributors. Their abilities to close deals may […]
Building Your Personal Brand
There’s a lot written about building Personal Brands. A lot of the discussion about Personal Branding has to do with leveraging Social Channels in building huge networks of followers. While it might be ego gratifying to have a large and wide network and to be well known, I think a lot of the thinking around building your personal brand is misdirected. In building our personal brands, we want to focus on building our reputations, perceptions, and visibility within our target customer and prospects, and influencers in that network. Social networks enable us to do this, if we do it smartly, […]
Help Your Customers Do Something More Important!
All of us want to be selling products and services that are mission critical for our customers. Imagine having a solution core to your customers’ business success, without it they couldn’t survive, grow, or thrive. The unfortunate reality is, for most of us, many of our products don’t fit that category. Don’t get me wrong, they provide great value, but they aren’t at the forefront of customers’ minds. Regardless how well be position the problems they solve, how well we quantify the value, often, the customer says, “I can scrape through for another year. I just don’t have an urgent […]
Overloaded And Overwhelmed
All of us, customers, sales people, marketing, customer service—everyone, daily face a number of converging forces which adversely impact our own and our organizations’ performances. The result is we are overloaded, overwhelmed, and probably not accomplishing what we should or could achieve. Taken individually, none of these forces is much concern. In fact some have very positive impacts on the results we produce But together they conspire to derail us, individually and organizationally. Let’s look at each one: Rising workloads: In the past 15 years, every organization has focused on getting as lean as possible. 15 years ago, there may have been many […]
Sales Managers Don’t Produce Revenue, Sales People Do!
Unless you are a sales manager with your own territory (which is an untenable position), you don’t produce revenue. Yes, you are measured on revenue and results, but you are not responsible for producing revenue, your people are! It’s an important point that too many in sales management don’t understand. Our people are responsible/accountable for producing revenue. It’s their jobs to find the deals, qualify them, and manage them to closure. It’s their jobs to develop and execute winning sales strategies. It’s their jobs to make their numbers. Some of you may be ripping your hair out, shrieking, “Dave, I […]
Sales Leadership Dysfunction — Disconnected Sales Execs
My last post in this series was about Sales Managers As Desk Jockeys. This post takes up and extends the idea about sales and other corporate executives, being disconnected from the worlds of their sales people and customers. Not long ago, I was speaking to an outstanding Sales Executive. We happened to be speaking about the Sales Manager Survival Guide. He was reflecting on how it reminded him of many challenges front line sales managers face. He talked about how easy it is, as a sales executive, to get disconnected with the “real worlds of front line sales managers and […]