Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Bits And Pieces—June 5, 2016
The past couple of weeks, I’ve pretty much focused on the launch of Sales Manager Survival Guide. In the first 24 hours after the release, the book hit the number 1 spot on Amazon’s “Hot New Books In Sales And Marketing.” More importantly, I had committed to donating 100% of the profits from the sale of the book to Charity:Water. I don’t have a full accounting of sales yet, but so far we’ve raised just about $1700. Don’t forget, from June1-August 31, I’ll be contributing 25% of the profits to Charity:Water, so you still have an opportunity to Get Smart […]
There Is Only One Answer
I get emails everyday from people seeking answers. Likewise, I read dozens of articles from people purporting to have the answers. The questions cover hundreds of areas: How do I get a person to answer the phone? How do I get a meeting? How do I differentiate my solutions from the competition? What’s my/our value proposition? How do I make sure I’m dealing with the right decisionmaker? How do I avoid discounting and defend my price? How do I make sure I hit my numbers? How do I make a killer sales call? How do I create a winning strategy? […]
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 […]