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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 — Dysfunctional Compensation Plans
My last post inn this series was “Super Hero Sales Managers.” I hesitated for a moment discussing this topic–sales compensation plans. In many ways, it’s a No-Win discussion. I can barely scratch the surface on this topic, sales people, sales executives, and non sales executives invovled in compensation are likely to be unhappy. Any time we talk about money, someone is likely to be unhappy, there will always be people on each side of the argument with persuasive arguments for their point of view–even if the argument is an “entitlement” argument. Since this series focuses on sales leadership, I’ll focus […]
Your Customers Have Problems, But Do They Know?
Not long ago, I got a call from a frustrated sales person. He had a huge opportunity with a customer, but just couldn’t get traction. He reviewed things with me. “I’ve been talking to them about our solutions. They seem to be interested, but they just aren’t moving forward the way they should. I’m really upset, they have so many problems that our solution fixes, but I just can’t get them to move forward.” He went on to review the problems. He had done a pretty good job of research. The issues seemed compelling, the sales person had done a […]
Business Focused, But People Centric
Often in understanding business leadership, people tend to focus on two extreme models of leaders. The first is the “It’s all about the numbers,” leader. Typically, these are portrayed as hard charging, data driven, task and goal focused, and sometimes ruthless executives. The other model is the human/people focused leaders. These are portrayed as caring more about people, their satisfaction, creating great collaborative work environments, expecting this will produce great results. In reality, great leadership requires a balanced approach to both (minus the ruthlessness). Great leaders are intensely business focused. They are driven to achieve, they have clarity about the […]
Drive Sales With Product Knowledge, Drive More With Customer Problem Knowledge!
I read an article entitled, “Drive Sales With Product Knowledge.” It was a good article, actually covering a lot a great issues, but focused on the importance of having strong product/solution knowledge. We know sales people have to be knowledgeable about our products and solutions, so I don’t disagree with the author’s premise. It’s just that product knowledge is just table stakes, it is insufficient both in being competitive and in maximizing our value to customers. Stated bluntly, customers don’t care about our products. Customers care about what they care about–it’s their own companies, jobs, opportunities, performance, and problems they face. […]
On Thrashing
Thrashing, at least in the manner I’d like to discuss, is actually a very technical term used by computer scientists and IT people. From Wikipedia: “In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse greatly. The situation may continue indefinitely until the underlying cause is addressed. The term is also used for various similar phenomena, particularly movement between other levels of the memory hierarchy, […]
Win Fast, Lose Faster!
Inevitably, as I do pipeline and deal reviews, I see sales people hanging onto too many bad deals. The deals are hopeless, the sales person may reluctantly admit it, but stubbornly wants to keep it in their active pipeline. These deals arise for all sorts of reasons, some good, but most bad. There are those deals way outside the sweet spot. Perhaps someone responded to a call or email, thinking there might be a fit or a need. But they are the wrong customer, customers where we have had very little success in the past (that’s why they aren’t in […]