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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
Who Are You? Why Should I Trust Buying From You?
Somehow you’ve attracted me to your site. You have an intriguing product. You have a solution I might be interested in. I want to learn more. But before I can go on, you put hurdles in my way. I can’t get beyond your splash page without giving you my contact information. Or I may be interested in subscribing, about to give you my credit card information and I stop. Who are you? Are you real? Are the people behind your company? Why should I trust you with this information? Is your offering real or am I just part of some […]
Are Too Many Sales People Achieving Quota?
I recently read this in an article from a sales compensation expert, “In high performing sales organizations 50-70% of sales people achieve quota. If your team is significantly above this, it’s possible your quotas are too easy. If more than 50% of your organization cannot achieve quota, you may have a quota setting issue or a larger problem with coverage or sales strategy.” I’m not a sales compensation expert. How could I be, once I was told by a manager, “Your pay increase will become effective when you are….” I’m still trying to figure that one out 😉 But I’m […]
Bits and Pieces — July 30, 2016
It’s been a while since I’ve published this random collection of thoughts. Here are a few things that I think are worth checking out: Continuous Learning: In the last Bits and Pieces, I mentioned I was taking the Coursera course on Model Thinking. I’ve gone on to enroll in Design Thinking For Innovation. Developing models and frameworks is critical for all sales and business professionals. As the complexity of our work, our organizations, and our customers skyrockets, we need models and frameworks to help us understand things, to help us evaluate how to most effectively achieve our goals, to help […]
Putting Aside Our Agenda For The Customer’s
Gary Peyrot asked a great question recently, He had read, “What Would Happen If We Saw Things The Way Our Customers Saw them?“ He ask, “How to you approach the solution from the customer’s point of view, ……do you need to purposefully put aside your own agenda?” It’s a question that actually hits to the root of the challenge every sales person faces. We’re driven by our goals and objectives. We have the responsibility for generating revenues for our company–selling products and solutions. But I think many sales people are conflicted when we talk about not focusing on your products […]
Micromanagers Don’t Trust Themselves
Somehow I get involved in lots of conversations about micromanaging. These conversations always have the same pattern. It’s an individual contributor talking about their manager, or a manager talking about a more senior manager—it goes all the way up the food chain, I recently heard of a CEO of a multi-billion organization approving every request for travel and expenditures over $100. The people are complaining—“It takes so much of my time; I can’t do anything without needing to ask them about it first; I have to report everything I do to them……” The diatribes usually end in some variant of, […]
Personas, Profiles, Relevance, Personalization, And Targeting–Stop Wasting Your Time
I tend to look to the approaches sales and marketing experts and automation suppliers as representative of preferred and best practices in sales and marketing. After all, they are the experts in driving effective, efficient, and impactful engagement with prospects and customers. It seems one would be well served by understanding what these people do as “best practices” in representing their own products and services, then adapting them to our own approaches to prospecting, engaging, and connecting with our customers. I do have to admit some confusion. Too often, the expert approaches they use in trying to engage their customers, […]