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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
The PIP—Performance Improvement Plan
Three letters, PIP, strike fear into the hearts of sales people and managers alike. It’s called different things, the PIP, the Performance Improvement Plan, the Measured Mile…… Typically, it’s the final straw in dealing with poor performers. Frankly, I think they are a pure waste of time and we should get rid of them—at least the way we currently use them! I can hear HR VP’s moaning, Corporate Counsels thinking “Has this guy every heard of a lawsuit? Along with the cheering from lots of managers? And a lot of people who are on a performance improvement plan or have been […]
Do You Have Experience Or Experiences?
I spend a lot of time interviewing candidates. They may be for sales or management roles. Past work experience, what they’ve done, and what they’ve taken away from those experiences are important to me. I, also, spend a lot of time mentoring people, helping them grow and build their careers. Experience and experiences are important–but they are different. Usually, they present me a rich array of experiences. These days, I see people may have 6-8 jobs in the past 10 years. They present the experiences positively: “I achieved quota 8 of the past 10 years.” “I was the top rep […]
Are You Creating Value In Every Customer Interaction?
In an outstanding post, Why Sales People Need To Create Value, Not Just Communicate, Bob Apollo cites a data point from Forrester: “Prospects say only 1 in 8 conversations with sales people are useful!” It’s a staggering number! 87.5% of the conversations customers are having with sales people are a waste of time! Think of the massive losses in productivity and costs that are incurred both on the part of customers and within our own sales organizations. Collectively, it’s $100’s of millions if not billions. It’s no wonder that customers put huge barriers to sales–screening calls, avoiding calls, putting gatekeepers in place. […]
The Costs Of Doing Nothing
I suspect the biggest costs both we (individually and within our organizations) and our customers incur is not the spending on new programs, solutions, methods, or change; but rather the costs of doing nothing. Yet we very seldom analyze and quantify these issues. Sometimes, mistakenly we treat them as sunk, even though we keep paying and paying and paying. Take an inventory — both what you do in your own work flow, what your organization does. Too often, inertia (the way we have always done things), busyness (we use activity as an excuse not to change now), laziness (we just […]
The Definitive Guide To The Future Of Selling
The debate rages, there are 100’s of articles discussing the future of selling. To many, the future of selling is social; to another large segment it’s inside sales; to some it’s the channel. Many declare cold calling is dead, still a small number declare selling is dead (I suppose to be replaced by ????) Likewise, there are debates about whether the future is based on Challenger, Insight, Relationship, Provocative, Solution, and others are how selling must be conducted in the future. And some declare Transactional Selling as long past it’s expiration date. It’s enough to confuse even the most seasoned of […]
LinkedIn Networking Run Amuck!
I wish I was making this stuff up, unfortunately, the incredibly bad practices of too many on LinkedIn are far more intriguing than anything I could make up. This morning, I get two LinkedIn messages from the same individual. The first was a InMail–it had something to do with effective use of LinkedIn InMails, and email marketing, but he wanted to talk to me about a product he is selling to do this stuff. The second was an invitation to connect — and you guessed it, it was the standard LinkedIn invitation, “I’d like to connect…..” You can already begin […]