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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
Perfect Prospecting
Recently, I published a rant on LinkedIn, “Patient 0 Of Stupid Prospecting.” This rant targeted a self appointed Sales Guru and Sales Trainer who had helped “thousands of sales people” over 15 years. A couple of people commented, “What does perfect prospecting look like?” I can’t tell you what perfect prospecting looks like, but I can tell you how to do it. Simply put perfect prospecting means “doing the work.” actually, “doing the right work.” Let me explain. Sloppy prospecting is too easy. Get an email list of a few thousand people, spend 15 minutes writing an email, push send. […]
How You Make Your Number Is As Important As Making The Number!
As a young sales person, I must have really frustrated my managers. I was disorganized, undisciplined–in short, all over the place. In spite of that, I always made my number….. Well, I’ve got to be honest, I had lots of ups and downs. Some months I’d miss, another month, I’d blow away my number, but I always made my number for the year! Usually on December 31 at 23:45. It drove my managers crazy. While I always made my number, I couldn’t tell them how I was going to make it. I worked hard, scrambled a lot, and had some […]
It’s Not About You!
I’d spent a long day doing deal reviews and a few critical call planning reviews. Everyone was well prepared—part of it was they knew they had to be. Apparently, my reputation for being tough had preceded me. The reviews were filled with strategies, goals, action plans. Many had deep competitive analysis with plans to overcome the competition. The discussions with team members and managers focused on “What are we selling, When, How Much Will We Get, What are the risks, When can you commit to the forecast, When do we need to ship, Can we upsell them, What discounting do […]
Send Your Customer Your Call Plan!
You do have a written call plan for every meeting, don’t you? Have you ever considered sending it (or a version of it) to the customer in advance? Now I know what you are thinking. “Dave has some crazy ideas, but he’s really gone off the deep end on this.” When I speak to groups of sales people about this, the response that always comes up is, “Well, if I do this, then my customer will know what I’m trying to accomplish!” My response is, “Well isn’t that the point? Don’t you want the customer to be as prepared as you […]
Manager, If You’re Doing Deals, You’re Not Doing Your Job
All sales professionals revel in doing deals. There’s an adrenaline rush working on a complex deal and making it happen. There’s the sense of attainment and accomplishment in winning a hard fought competition. There’s that momentary celebration, high-five’s, before we move on to the next. But as managers, as great as that feeling is, if we are spending the majority of our time doing deals, then we aren’t doing our jobs. (The corollary, is if your sales people aren’t doing deals, then they aren’t doing their jobs.) When we moved from being individual contributors to being leaders and managers, our […]
7 People In 10 Years!
Recently, I had an email exchange with a friend. He was seeking advice about his current role. As he described his situation, I stopped him at the sentence, “I’m the 7th person in 10 years to hold this job.” Without knowing anything more, the problem–at least the primary problem–had nothing to do with him (or probably his predecessors). It is a management problem — or rather a mismanagement problem! Let’s run the math and think about the implications of this. 7 people in 10 years means average tenure of 17 months. Research data shows onboarding generally takes 10 months (in […]