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
Sales People Are Not Automatons!
Recently, I was doing pipeline, deal, and territory reviews with several sales teams. In the reviews, they were clearly struggling–they had new sales processes, new tools to help them in executing their deal strategies, developing their accounts, and managing their pipelines. All had been put in place to help improve their effectiveness and performance. But they were struggling, performance wasn’t improving, they were spending a lot more time on the tools/processes than they were in actually engaging and executing with customers. As we progressed in the reviews, it became clear they were getting caught up in the “form” of the […]
You Can’t Get What You Want By Focusing On What YOU Want
Bear with me on my word play in the title. I was just doing some deal reviews with a very frustrated sales person. He had a deal that was very important to him. He’d been working it for a long time, he needed it to make his numbers, he was in the closing stage of the process. Apparently, he was winning the deal, but he couldn’t get the PO. He told me, “They’ve told me I’ve won and I should get the PO any day now. But that was weeks ago, I keep calling them asking, ‘Where’s the PO?’ They […]
Selling In A “Knowledge Based” Economy
The days of product, even solution based differentiation are long passed. We can no longer count on great products to provide sustained differentiation and competitive advantage. Don’t get me wrong, great products and solutions are the foundation of our businesses and the value we create for customers. They are the things our customers buy and implement to achieve their own strategic growth goals. So they are critical to thriving economies and company growth. But as we look at our customers’ buying processes, great products and solutions are table stakes to getting considered. Ultimately, the differentiator is the knowledge and experience […]
Design Your Customer Experience To Lose The Right Customers!
I received an interesting email. A person had read a post I had written about Customer Experience. As a result, he was motivated to sign up for my newsletter. There the difficulties began. Apparently the “widget” I use doesn’t allow for keyboard short-cuts. That was a problem with this individual’s customer experience of my site. It didn’t stop there, apparently there is the same problem with the confirmation email, which further annoyed this individual. He implied there are other things about the process that annoyed him–but the only other thing he would receive is a thank you email. So, I’m not […]
A Frightening Look At The “Cost Of A Sales Person”
I worry, sometimes, that we take the process of hiring, onboarding, coaching, developing and managing the performance of sales people too casually. Too often, managers tend to treat sales people as commodities. There’s an attitude of quickly hiring the best that’s available, if that person doesn’t work out, we can fire them and hire someone new. Likewise, as business goes through it’s natural ups and downs, sales organizations are expanded and contracted to fit our budgets. It’s not just a sales management issue, too many sales people move from job to job, never staying in a job long enough to be […]
Are You Answering The Right Question?
I’m occasionally amused by some of the comments and responses my blog posts provoke. Not long ago, I published a post, The Best Sales Person I Ever Known. In the post, I basically said this was a meaningless question. The answer depended on a huge number of things, which until defined would produce a meaningless answer. Even then, it would be individually based, and someone else’s experience of that “best” sales person would be completely different. Yet, an amazing number of people, whether on LinkedIn, or email, sent me the names of the best sales person they ever met. Clearly, […]