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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
Performance Metric Friday — Deal Slippage
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of the Performance Metric Friday posts, but a post from Chris Brogan stimulated this. I want to focus Deal Slippage. We all know about deal slippage. We qualify a customer, we understand their buying process, we align our activities to complement their buying process, we set a Target Close Date in our CRM system. Time goes on, we get diverted, then get re-engaged, but because of that, the deal has slipped a little. We update the CRM. Our customer slows down, maybe they are diverted, maybe it’s just taking them longer than […]
What’s A Fitbit Have To Do With Selling?
I love my Fitbit! Actually, I have several devices that measure my performance in my athletic endeavors. Heart rate monitors for my running, computers measuring my power, speed, cadence, climbing, etc on my bike, but my Fitbit is my go to “wearable.” It’s always in my pocket. I don’t have to do anything, but it’s monitoring my activity. It counts the steps I take, though it does go crazy when I’m on my bike, it monitors the stairs I climb, hills I walk up, my sleep, my activity levels, and the calories I burn. The Fitbit app allows me to assign […]
How Do They Make Money, Part 2
Recently I wrote, How Do They Make Money. It focused on understanding how our customers make money—deep understanding of their goals, strategies, markets, customers, plans, priorities to grow their business. In the article, I also talked about how we need to show the customer how we can help them make more money–by growing top line or bottom line or both. Let me extend this discussion further. Many organizations leverage channels, alliances, and various types of partnerships in their sales deployment strategies. These partners go by all sorts of names, VAR’s, Resellers, Distributors, Dealers, Integrators, Manufacturer’s Representatives, Agents, and so forth. They are […]
How Do They Make Money?
No, I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about your customers. At the core of everything we do as sales people, it’s about making money, that is producing revenue for our companies. We know how our companies make money, it’s through the revenues we create in selling the products and services. It’s also through our companies’ abilities to develop, produce, deliver and support those products/services profitably. Easy, we get that. But that’s not what drives our success as sales people. That’s not what creates our ability to engage our customers. They don’t care about how we make money–some seem to […]
Stop Wasting Your Time On Social Selling!
Recently, someone wrote me saying: “I have absolutely no idea how you have time to spend so long on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, plus write articles for every site imaginable – and respond to all the comments…” This individual thought I was possibly wasting my time. I think it’s a fair question, many people wonder whether they should be investing in social channels, how much time to invest, whether there is a payoff. Social selling, social business, and the technologies underlying them are evolving so quickly that it’s very confusing. The amount of time and channels will vary for everyone, so there is no […]
Pipeline Games
I’m always amused by the games that go on as managers conduct pipeline and forecast reviews. Data shows sales people spend at least two hours a week on pipeline and forecast reviews. Think of it, 5% of the sales organization’s time in some of the most confusing and useless discussions I’ve seen. If we learned how to do these effectively, we could not only improve the quality of these reviews and information, as well as significantly reduce time spent in reviews. Here’s a scenario I run across too often: The first line sales manager sits down with the team collectively or […]