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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
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 […]
Losing Your Highest Performing Salesperson!
No one wants to lose their highest performing sales people. Ideally, we do everything we can to keep them challenged, excited, motivated, and contributing. Often, if we think they are in danger of being wooed away to a competitor or another job, we’ll look at adjusting compensation, incentives or other things. We do whatever we can to retain these high performers. Yet there is one hugely stupid mistake we make that causes us to lose too many of our top performers. We promote them into sales management! If I had a nickel for every time I saw this happen……… (well […]
What’s Your Ask/Tell Ratio?
Whether you are a manager or a sales person, your Ask/Tell ratio is critical to your effectiveness. The Ask/Tell ratio is a simple concept–few people think about it. It’s simply the ratio of questions you ask, compared to the statements you make. Ideally, your Ask/Tell ratio is significantly over 1. That means you spend a lot of time asking questions, learning, exploring, discovering. As a sales person, a high Ask/Tell ratio probably indicates you are engaging your customer in conversations about them and their business. Through your questions and discovery, you are helping them learn, helping them explore, helping them […]