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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 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 […]
How SaaSy Is Your Sales Model?
SaaS has become all the rage of businesses these days. Of course it’s attractive when we see the number of SaaS unicorns or when we read of the high growth rates of SaaS companies (though a 100% growth rate of a young $1M SaaS company is very different than the 5% growth rate of a $1B company.) But there’s a lot of sex and sizzle behind these business models, with everyone wanting to jump on board–giving rise to Everything as a Service. Inevitably, there’s a lot of confusion as companies try and many fail to emulate what they see in […]
Bits And Pieces — June 25, 2016
A few updates you may find interesting to peruse over the weekend. What I’m Learning: I’m in the middle of an outstanding course entitled: Model Thinking on Coursera. It’s taught by Scott Page of the University of Michigan. It’s a fascinating course. I think every sales professional should look at courses on models and systems thinking. Not only do they help us makes sense of our own complex work environments, they provide us critical thinking and problem solving skills to help our customers. Movies You Should See: Just saw The Music Of Strangers. It follows Yo-Yo Ma and members of […]