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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
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 […]
There Are No Cliff Notes To Success
I’m ashamed to admit it, but at one time, I was addicted to Cliff Notes. Yes, in college, I bought Cliff Notes for some courses—you know the ones. They were the courses that had nothing to do with my major but were courses I had to take to graduate. Most of my knowledge of classic English Literature is not from reading or studying English Literature, but from devouring the Cliff Notes before the exam. (I think part of my shame is that Mom reads these posts everyday. She thought I was a great student. Sorry Mom, Dickens really has never been […]
Wishful Thinking
Over the past weeks, I’ve been participating in a number of quarterly reviews–sales people presenting to their managers, regional vice presidents reporting to the CSO, EVP’s and GM’s presenting to the CEO. A part of each of these reviews is the outlook for this quarter and the rest of the year. Most are OK, maybe not great, but you can see a way for them to get to the goals they are trying to achieve. But every once in a while, there are some beautiful works of science fiction or wishful thinking. It’s usually from a person who has badly […]