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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
More Crazy Thinking About Compensation
This morning I get a call, it’s the CEO and VP of Sales on a conference phone. Apparently, they had read my recent article: We’ll Fix Performance Problems In The Commission Plan. They had a problem. Their people weren’t hitting the numbers and goals that had been established. They thought the commission plan was the problem and were thinking about making adjustments to the commission plan to solve the performance problem. I probed, asking some questions about the compensation plan. It turns out, their people were on a 100% commission plan. As if the implications of this aren’t obvious, I’ll […]
Please Stop Insisting We Have A Problem
I really appreciate sales people who bring us new insights about things happening in our industry and markets. We are anxious to learn, we are always interested in opportunities to grow our business. Recently, I’ve a number of sales people have been prospecting, insisting that we have problems. The problems are all over the place. One is insisting that our demand generation efforts are not producing results, our demise is imminent, but if I just take the time for a demo, he can provide the solutions to all our problems. Another, while not being as direct as I’m saying, is […]
Your Value Proposition Isn’t What You Say
I’m amazed at the number of sales people that continue to think their value proposition is a pithy sentence that you say to a customer that all of a sudden causes them to pull out and sign a purchase order. Everyday, I get calls from sales and marketing people asking for help on their value propositions. After a few minutes of questions, they always seem to be looking for the same thing, “What are the few sentences that we can tell the customer that express our value and differentiation?” Most of them recognize they have to adapt those sentences to […]
We’ll Fix Performance Problems In The Commission Plan!
I’m amazed by the number of calls I for advice on compensation and commission planning. It’s not the usual thing about how to put a compensation system in place. Instead it’s managers who want to address performance issues by adjusting the compensation plan. The conversation usually goes something like: “I can’t get my sales people to sell this product line, I want to adjust their compensation plan to get them to sell more of that product line,” or “I can’t get them to spend their time doing these things…… I was thinking if I put a bonus on it, I […]
When Numbers Lie
I was conducting a series of reviews with a team of sales executives. They were struggling to meet their numbers, asked me to spend some time with them. As usual, one of the first things I looked at was their pipeline. I asked them a few questions about win rates, sales cycles, average deal value—they had some answers, but not the kind that make one feel really comfortable. After a quick review, I said, “You need to dramatically increase the number of opportunities in your pipeline, you aren’t chasing enough high quality deals to achieve your goals, based on your current performance.” The […]
Fallacies In Our Thinking About A, B, And C Players
Management and sales management literature is filled with endless discussions about A, B, and C players. All of this comes from the seminal work of Dr. Bradford Smart in Topgrading. We want to build teams of A players. We want to develop our B players into A players. We want to move our C players into roles where they can be A or at least B players. All of it is pretty simple and makes huge sense, at least on paper. We see organizations taking this approach. quite literally, with wholesale purging of C players and constant churn in their […]