Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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 Operations–Under Appreciated Resource For Sales Effectiveness
Sales Operations has a different meaning for every organization. In some organizations, Sales Operations keeps the numbers—they provide all the reporting on sales attainment, the forecast, all other metrics. In other organizations, they are responsible for systems, programs, processes, and tools. In others, Sales Operations also provides training. In other organizations, they are responsible for pricing and coordinating responses to big deals. Sales people have a love/hate relationships with folks from Sales Operations. “They keep harassing me for reports,” “All they care about is the systems and the numbers!” “They’re the back room operations people–they don’t understand what it takes […]
Pipeline Integrity
The 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, […]
You Have To REALLY Care!
Last 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 […]
What Questions Are You Asking Your People?
Sales 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: […]
I Don’t Care How Much Time You Spend Selling!
Sorry, I have to admit, I’m letting off a little steam on this post. I just got off of “one of those” weekly review calls. You know the one’s I’m talking about. We are going through the pipeline, looking at each person’s territory, how they’re doing and getting a mid quarter look at what the end of the quarter will be. There are a few sales people whining, ” You don’t understand the long hours we are working! We’re putting in the effort!” But their pipelines are a disaster. When I looked at the activity, i wasn’t clear how they were spending […]
“The Secret Sauce To Sales Enablement……”
I recently read a quite interesting blog post entitled, “The Secret Sauce To Sales Enablement–Knowledge Management.” The post was quite interesting, but the title bothered me. I reflected on a lot of what I’ve seen written about sales enablement. There are rich, well thought out architectures, frameworks, tools. They cover everything from soup to nuts. There are slight differences–if you are a tool vendor, you talk about technology and tools and how they facilitate the effective and efficient delivery of content. Others tend to approach it at a slightly higher level, talking about rich hierarchies of structures, content, systems, tools, […]