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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
High Performing Organizations Outperform Low Performing Organizations!
Over the past 5 years, we’ve been trying to understand sales performance. As part of this, we’ve conducted a comprehensive study of several hundred organizations, including 0ver 30,000 sales managers/executives. The results of this study are stunning–though they reaffirm beliefs we held. What surprised us was the magnitude of the performance differences. Normalizing the data for organization size, region, industry, solution set, we discovered something astounding: 100% of high performing organizations perform better than 100% of low performing organizations! (The standard deviation was very small). Intuitively, we have always believed this, but having the data analysis reinforcing this is simply […]
Is Sales Coaching Dead?
I recently read a post, “Is Sales Coaching Dead?” It was written by a team I respect, and was based on extensive research. The results are interesting–and can lead to confusion in the interpretation. In assessing, 17 critical sales management competencies, the survey ranked Sales Coaching as the most critical competency–5.8/7.0, the bottom ranked was Business Acumen at 4.3. Now here’s where it gets confusing. The study went on to assess the effectiveness in training those 17 competencies with actual sales achievement. The results, at least taken on face value, suggest completely different competencies drive business results. Business Acumen was […]
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 […]