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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
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 […]
Mastering Your Value Proposition
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Will Barron of Salesman Red about Value Propositions. As Will reflected in the discussion, too many sales people don’t really understand Value Propositions or how they create the most value for their customers. I enjoyed the discussion with Will. Hope you do, as well. By the way, Will runs a regular series of video and podcasts. They are outstanding, make sure you visit.
Ditching The Performance Review! Another Look
There is no doubt the performance planning and review process in most organizations is broken. Too often, it’s a meaningless annual exercise of managers and their people filling out forms, having “the conversation” then going back to their real work. Too often, the review process has become completely detached from how managers work with their people on a day to day basis. In my own past jobs, even at senior levels, I’ve had my managers hand me a blank form, asking me to fill it out, then we sit down and talk about it. We would go through the motions […]