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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
What’s Your Special Number?
I spend a lot of time writing about metrics and performance management. It’s critical that we Know Our Numbers. It’s important to analyze performance over time, understanding where we are successful where we need to improve, and identifying new opportunities. Having said that, at times we tend to either drown in data or hide behind constant analysis. Our numbers are important, knowing where we are, looking at how we improve is important. But each of us has that “special number.” It’s not the magic number that tells you everything is in control, but it’s that number that tells you you’re […]
Imagine Making A Sales Call Without Mentioning The Product
We are anxious to meet with customers to tell them all about our products and services. We practice the few questions we need to ask–you know the one’s—they create the platform to launching into descriptions about how our product it the answer to everything they want to do. We practice our pitches, refining and polishing them, hoping that at the end, the customer pulls out a purchase order saying, “I need to buy a bunch of these!.” Our product and marketing people train us incessantly on product capabilities, how we stack up against competition. They train us in the questions we […]
Calling On the People We Always Call On….
I spend a lot of time doing deal reviews. A critical part of each review is understanding who will be involved in the decision-making process and who we are calling on. While it’s Sales 101 to be calling on the decision-makers, too often sales people are calling on who they are calling on. By this, I mean that sales people are talking to whoever will talk to them, though they may not be the most important people for the decision. The way this happens is very seductive, many sales people don’t even realize they may not be focusing on the right […]
Do You Really Understand Your Numbers?
As sales people and managers, we are often obsessed with the “numbers.” There are constant review of pipelines and forecasts. Some look at the daily and weekly activity metrics. Everyone is focused on quota performance. In order to maximize our performance this week, this month, this quarter, this year, and year after year, we need to understand the numbers that impact performance and our success over time. I’m amazed by the number of sales people and managers that really don’t understand their numbers, or how various metrics interrelate. It’s impossible to look at all aspects of numbers, but let me […]
You’re Fired!!
Matt Heinz wrote a terrific piece, How To Fire Someone With Dignity, Grace, And Respect. Be sure to read it, few have handled this touchy topic as well as Matt does. It struck a nerve. Too often, I see performance based terminations actually executed as “Layoff’s” or “RIF’s.” Typically, instead of addressing the performance issue head on, a manager goes to the employee stating, “I’m really sorry, but we are cutting back and your job has been eliminated.” Usually, there’s some kind of separation agreement, a round of “I’m sorry, good luck in your next role,” the employee is disappointed and confused, […]
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 […]