Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Yeah, yeah, we all know it’s how we’ve “always” forecasted probability and weighted our pipelines. Yes, for some reason all the CRM vendors “out of the box” implementation of the pipeline ties probability of winning to where you are in the sales process. But when are we going to stop this simplistic and flatly wrong thinking about the probability of winning a deal? You know what I’m talking about. We have a prospect who returns our call, we immediately declare a 10% probability of winning, because our systems are set up like that. We have a couple of meetings, have qualified them, determined their needs, […]
Read MoreThe funnel/pipeline is a key tool for sales people and managers to assess performance. It provides so many insights beyond knowing whether you will make your sales goals. One of the first things I look at on any new project is the pipeline. It tells me so much about the organization or the sales person. It’s one of the most powerful tools available to sales professionals, but too many fail to understand it. A couple of years ago, I was called into a large technology company. “Dave, our folks just don’t know how to close! We’ve got lots of deals, […]
Read MoreLast night, I had dinner with a great team of executives. The conversation went over all sorts of topics, but toward the end of dinner, one of the executives turned to me and asked, “If you had to identify just one thing that would help me and my team perform at the highest level, what would that be?” My mind was racing, I could easily reel off a half dozen things–clear metrics, strong process, customer focus, …….. But he asked me for the ONE thing. As I reflected, I replied, “You have to REALLY care!” I thought of the great managers I’d had in […]
Read MoreSales managers have a great deal of influence on the behavior of their people just by the questions they ask. Any self respecting sales person doesn’t want to look like a fool to the manager. So if you consistently ask certain questions, they will quickly understand and come prepared to answer the questions. So that’s the good news …… and the bad news. It turns out, too often, managers are asking the wrong questions and, as a result, driving the wrong behaviors with their people. One of the biggest mistakes are the two questions, too many managers ask over and over: […]
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