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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
Why Are They Buying—Do They Know?
I’ve written, often, about the importance of understanding why our customers are buying. Too often, we lose this in our headlong rush to pitch our products and get the purchase order. We fail to understand what the customer is trying to achieve, their goals, the opportunities they are trying to address. We don’t know what’s making them dissatisfied with their current operations and driving the need to buy. Clearly we increase our effectiveness and impact when we clearly understand what’s driving the customer and the consequences of doing nothing. But in today’s world of large buying groups and complex decision-making, […]
The Examples We Set, Our People Are Watching
As managers and leaders, we create (consciously or unconsciously) dozens of “training” moments for our people, every day. Our people watch our every move, drawing conclusions about what they should be doing, how they should be behaving, where they should invest their time, and what their priorities are. What we do and how we act become more impactful than what we say. It’s so simple, yet we make so many mistakes: We want our sales people to use the tools and systems we’ve invested in—but we still ask our admins to print out a report, or send us the updated […]
Knowing Versus Doing
There were some interesting comments on my post, Focus On The Customer–Magic Happens! Mike Kunkle wrote that he found it “Amazing that people were amazed.” Michael Harris raised the issue of “Knowing Versus Doing.” These are issues I wrestle with constantly, and which drive great frustration. I think this issue–Knowing Versus Doing–it at the crux of organizational and individual performance excellence. Whether we are looking at sales, marketing, customer service or any type of sustained levels of high performance, more often than not, it seems we know what we should be doing–yet we consistently fail to execute. For my entire […]
Figuring It Out, Critical Sales Competency!
I spend a lot of time in group meetings or 1 on 1’s with sales people trying to understand how they do their jobs and trying to understand what they need to be more effective and drive bigger numbers. To be honest, most of the time I have to bite my tongue as I listen to the litany of things they need to be successful. It always starts with more and better products–along with the lowest prices. When I hear that, I think, “If we have that, why do we need you?” It then goes on to laundry lists including, […]
Your Numbers Give You The Questions, Not The Answers!
I’m obsessed with metrics and numbers. Call anyone in our company for help on sales performance and we will ask you to dump all sorts of data on us: Historical performance, historical performance by sales person, by customer segment, by product, by region, pipeline metrics, sales cycle time, win rates, average deal value, deal distribution, customer retention, customer churn, new customer acquisition, share of customer, share of solution, share of territory, any number of activity metrics, phase of the moon/tidal currents and their relationship to the sales cycle. OK, the last data point is just experimental—we can’t yet draw conclusions […]
Focus On The Customer, Magic Happens!
Several weeks ago, I did a deal review with a client. It was a very large deal, important to my client. The sales person is an outstanding sales person–one of the top performers in the organization. As I looked at the notes on the deal, the sales person had a number of good conversations with people in the organization. He had a pretty good understanding of what they were trying to do. He was laser focused on demonstrating how his solution was the best in helping the customer achieve the goal. He was trying to reach the decision-maker and had […]