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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
Sales People Do What You Measure And Compensate Them To Do!
I’m sure there are some snarky reactions, “Well thanks for the insight Dave, I never knew that?#!” Yeah, Yeah, we all know that, but here’s the real issue, “Are we measuring and compensating them to do the things we WANT them to do?” That’s where things start falling apart. My posts, Sometimes Revenue Is The Wrong Sales Metric and Conditions Of Employment have stirred a flood of comments and emails. I thought I’d expand the discussion here. Growing revenue, and profits, are key objectives of any organization. Simplistically, we think of sales as responsible for driving revenue growth. After all, […]
Sometimes Revenue Is The Wrong Sales Metric
Sales people are accountable for generating revenue—–Duuuuggghh! Ask a sales person what their primary goal is, they say: “I have to make my quota!” Ask them what that means and they say “I’m accountable for generating $X million in orders or revenue.” But sometimes revenue is the wrong metric. In just the past two weeks, I’ve been involved in half a dozen discussions about the challenges people were having with overall performance of the sales organization. Each of them was primarily because the most important goal for each sales person was revenue–and that was the wrong metric. I’ll share just one […]
Conditions Of Employment
A warning to my readers, I tend to be a little hard nosed every once in a while. This is one of those times. I’m reacting to a cumulative build up of a number of conversations about compensation planning, incentives, and “motivating” sales people. So many of the discussions focus on rewards and incentives for behaviors that should be conditions of continued employment. When we employ people, we expect certain behaviors. We expect they act ethically and with integrity. That they come into work on time, work regular hours. That they complete their reports, keep managers informed (dare I say, […]
We Misunderstand Lean—But It Is So Important!
I was having a conversation about the “state of sales” with some colleagues recently, some of the smartest people I know in looking at sales performance. I asked them, “How are you seeing sales organizations leverage Lean concepts?” The reaction was quick, “Oh you’re talking about eliminating waste……” It’s a natural reaction but a real misunderstanding of Lean and Agile methods. Sure, in Lean we eliminate waste–it’s important, but that’s not the value of lean. And I think this misunderstanding, is why so few sales and marketing organizations don’t understand the power of Lean. Lean has huge traction in about every […]
Sales Role Agility
It’s human nature to categorize things and people. It enables us to build models and constructs. It enables us to more easily deal with ambiguity, abstractions, and other things. Somehow things seem easier and clearer when everything has a box and everything is in its box. We characterize and categorize sales people–putting the different types into boxes–hunters/farmers, lone wolves, consultative, connectors, challengers, relationship builders, conductors, builders, transactors, and so forth. Each has it’s own characteristics. Depending on the fashion of the times, or one’s biases, one is perceived as better than the other. Need to acquire new customers, an executive will […]
Who Cares About Big Data, Where Are The Big Questions?
This morning, I’m sitting in a series of presentations extolling the value of big data. I get it–kind of. I get that more data has been created in the past 2 years than in the history of mankind. I get that data is everywhere, we can know so much about so many different things. I get there are very powerful tools, enabling us to gather disparate types of data from thousands of sources, slicing and dicing it in ways previously unimaginable. I think if I hear one more statistic, hear any more testimonials about the power of big data, I’ll throw […]