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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
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 […]
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 […]