Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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, March 12, 2016
I’ve decided to start a new feature on the blog called Bits And Pieces. I’ll publish it on Friday evening’s or Saturday morning–hopefully weekly. The purpose of these posts is to provide brief ideas, perspectives, things I’m thinking about, or announcements of things I’m involved in. I’d love your perspective on how to make this more useful. Books: I just completed the most important book I’ve read in a long time. Mindset by Carol Dweck is fantastic, particularly learning how we can move from fixed to growth oriented mindsets. It’s probably the single most impactful book you can read. What […]
Business People Who Sell
Our customers don’t need sales people calling on them. They don’t need a person that can only focus on talking about their products and services–after all customers have the web to learn about products. They don’t need someone that can engage in a scripted conversation, listening for key words, so they can set up a demo or pass them onto someone who will be talking about their products. Our customers work in businesses. Each business, each customer within those businesses face different challenges and have different opportunities. Their focus is on doing their jobs, on achieving their goals, on being successful. […]
Making The Numbers!
Every sales professional is obsessed with making the numbers. Meet another sales person and there’s that secret language we use in speaking to each other. Where’re you at? How are you doing? What’s your year looking like? To non sales people, these are different, perhaps slightly philosophical questions. But to every sales person, it’s about the number, quota, or our attainment against monthly, quarterly, annual objectives. In our quest to “make the numbers,” we often miss an entirely different set of numbers that need to be made. If these numbers aren’t achieved, it’s unlikely we’ll ever make our numbers. It’s the […]
Good Selling Is A Choice
Jill Konrath has a fantastic post and video, Being Good At Sales Is A Choice. Be sure to read it, it’s a perfect complement to this post (Jill, thanks for letting me riff off your concept). What is Good Selling? Is it making your numbers? Absolutely, that’s your job. Making your numbers requires you to not only be good at selling, it requires good selling. Good selling is really all about the customer. It makes sense, if there were no customers, how could we sell–good or bad? Good selling puts the customer at the center of everything we do. It […]
When The Script Works
Over the past weeks, I’ve been arguing against mindless scripts being executed mindlessly. But what happens if the script works? Recently, I responded to an email, get the inevitable call, the SDR opens with “We can help with your performance measurement issues…..” I wasn’t sure I had any performance measurement issues, but was interested in learning more. I had described our key metrics and asked, “What should we be doing differently?” The sales person had, apparently, been prepped for that, saying, “You need more KPI’s and you need them in real time.” I asked, “Why?” The rep paused, “I can arrange […]
Sales Managers Are Killing The Sales Organization!
It may be that time of year. or maybe I’m just more aware of it, but it seems that too many sales managers are focused on killing the sales organization. Researchers constantly remind us that buying is changing, that buyers prefer to minimize contact with sales, reducing it to the last 20-43% of their buying process. They give us feedback from customers: “They don’t understand my problem, they talk about their products, they don’t care about what we are trying to do….” The lists go on. The inevitable conclusion of these reports is that buying is changing, customers have better […]