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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
It’s Not About The Process……
I talk about the buying and selling process all the time. Everyone knows that you have to have a sales process, some even know it has to align with the customer buying process. Our CRMs come with predefined selling processes. Every training program incorporates some sort of process. But when I work with sellers, even working with leaders, they aren’t using the process. There’s all sorts of rationalizing and excuse making. “This deal is different, I can’t follow the process…..” “Things have changed, our process was developed 10 years ago….” (Some legitimacy to this.). Most of the time, I see […]
“I Don’t Have The Time To Coach!”
Coaching has the highest impact on maximizing sales performance! There’s all sorts of research supporting this statement, I’ve written about it ad nauseam. There’s also the data that shows how little time managers spend coaching, often less than one hour a week—for their entire team. But I continue to hear, “I don’t have the time to coach!” I’ve been hearing this for decades. I’ve been writing about this for decades, the first article I wrote was in 2009, and there have been about 5 subsequent articles with virtually the same topic. And it’s still a huge issue and roadblock to […]
What Does Sales Excellence Really Look Like?
When I’m speaking to groups, I often pose the question, “What does sales excellence really look like?” Without hesitation responses come flooding in, “Hitting the numbers!” “Beating the competitors!” “Winning the big deals!” “Crushing my quota!” “Maxing my comp!” As great as these outcomes seem, they really don’t define sales excellence–or indicate that you are excellent at selling. It might mean that you are just good enough. There’s a good market, you have a great product, you found the right customer with the right sense of urgency, and, perhaps, a little bit of luck. I’ve started calling this, “The Good […]
Losing Our Entry Level Jobs!!!
We are inundated with news of layoffs and reductions that, somehow, are attributed to AI. We see predictions of the loss of entry level jobs. In selling, for example, many SDR/BDR jobs will disappear. In marketing, many content/demand gen jobs will disappear. In customer service many of those jobs will disappear. Alarm bells are ringing, accompanied by massive hand wringing! Some suggest we need to slow down our investments in AI to protect those entry level jobs. Some are just shrugging their shoulders, saying “Shit happens…..” Some are saying, “Where do we build the skills for the more senior level […]
The Forecast Isn’t A Number!
As the end of the calendar year approaches, the inevitable articles and conversations about forecasting arise. We are asked for our forecasts and we provide a number. Perhaps that’s at the beginning of the quarter, and we are held accountable for that number through the remainder of the quarter—though that number always changes, and rarely is it an upward change. But the forecast isn’t a number! The forecast is really about a deal. Will a decision be made, and a PO signed in a specific timeframe–say this quarter? The forecast becomes the aggregation of the deals we believe will be […]
Setting Up Front Line Managers For Success
Front line managers have the highest impact in driving seller performance. Sadly, too many organizations fail to set these managers up for success, as a result, the organization underperforms it’s potential. Millions are spent on training, tools, technology for individual contributors, while little is invested for front line managers. Coaching individual contributors is viewed as critical to their development and success, yet front line managers receive little or no coaching themselves. How do we reverse this? What do we do to set these FLMs up for success, maximizing their own ability to perform, and through that, maximizing the performance of […]