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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 Manager, How Are You Performing?
I want to have a heart to heart with Sales Managers/Executives. Sales people and others can listen in if you want. We need to have a serious discussion about your performance. Yeah, I know we always tend to talk about the performance of our people, but we need to focus on your own performance. After all, the data on sales management turnover is pretty disturbing—the average longevity in the job is 20 months. Sales management, at every level, is a tough job. We are expected to perform—that is make the numbers. If we don’t, executive management will quickly look for […]
Activities Or Results, What Should We Do?
In reading the title, many of you may be asking, “Dave to you get up on the stupid side of your bed this morning? Of course we care about results!” It’s often hard to tell this, based on what we ask our people to do, or what we inflict on them. We know we have to do activities to produce results. For example, we have to do a certain amount of prospecting to find enough qualified opportunities to fill our pipelines. We have activities that are critical to moving deals through the pipeline, for example demos and many other things. […]
Get Smart, Do Good!
I’ve been obsessing about this date, May 24, 2016 for some months. It is the target date we established for the launch of Sales Manager Survival Guide. We’ve made it, for some of you who’ve visited Amazon, we actually made it several days ago! This is an unusual post, my sole objective is to get you to BUY! I have two fundamental reasons to ask that you BUY, particularly in the next couple of days. My reasons, however, aren’t to “get the order,” so I hit the sales goals the team established. Long time readers of this blog know that […]
The Toughest Job In Sales
Sales is tough. Probably each person reading this thinks their job is the toughest. If you are a sales person, you’ve got to hit your numbers. You’re out there trying to find enough opportunities, you need to work those opportunities through the pipeline, getting enough to make quota. If you are a SDR, it’s taking those leads, reaching out to people, most of whom, probably don’t want to talk to you. You have to sort through the literature collectors, tire kickers, until you find the right ones to qualify and pass on . As the top sales executive, you have […]
Doing The Deal Or Solving The Problem
I wrote Solving Our Customers’ Problems several days ago. My friend Martin Schmalenbach, of Microchip Technology, wrote a long comment about his real world experiences as a customer of sales training and sales enablement solutions. The comment provided such a vivid description of the customer perspective and his reactions to several very different approaches to earning his business. I asked Martin’s permission to publish his story here: We’ve just completed another sales boot camp here at Microchip – 64 Field folk from all over the world, here at our corporate HQ for 2 weeks of an experience (rather than training) […]
Should Sales Managers Coach?
Perusing my news feeds this morning, an article entitled, “Should Sales Managers Coach” caught my eye. My knee jerk reaction was , “Duugggh, isn’t the answer obvious?” However, I respect the author and decided to read the article to understand the point of view (or perhaps it was one of the provocative titles to get someone to read). I reread the article 5 times. I think the author’s conclusion is “Yes, but……” Upon reflection, I think perhaps the points of view addressed in the article are more indicative of the confusion we have about the sales manager’s job. Is it […]