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.
A False Positive is a term used in medicine. Imagine some sort of test that comes back with results saying you have a life threatening condition, but in reality you don’t. The results of the test were mistaken, giving a False Positive. If your doctor doesn’t know the results are mistaken, that a False Positive has occurred, the doctor could prescribe treatments for a condition you don’t have. They can be quite painful and may create a whole series of problems that can be devastating. In medicine, researchers and doctors are particularly concerned about False Positives. Often, the reason multiple […]
Read MorePrepare yourself for a rant, it’s been one of those mornings! As a preface, I’m proud of being a sales professional. I aspire to create value for my customers in every exchange. I strive to learn and improve, despite the years of experience and greying hair. But then I get mornings like this, I’ve been besieged by a half dozen of the most ill-conceived, poorly executed, manipulative prospecting calls one can imagine. They make me ashamed to be a sales person. It started in the middle of the night. My mobile beeped with a text. “Dave, how r u doing? Haven’t […]
Read MoreYeah, I know, I know. Many readers will react to this title with responses like, “Isn’t Sales Competence an oxymoron? Isn’t that something like Military Intelligence?” But if we want to maximize sales performance across our organizations, it’s critical that we have a model that identifies critical competencies for the sales organization. Without this, we have no framework for performance management, coaching, development or continuous improvement. In the absence of a sales competence framework or model, often we evaluate and track the wrong things. Too often, we track things like quota performance. But that doesn’t necessarily tell you whether the sales person is […]
Read MoreSales people don’t like the routine! We do different things every day. Each situation is different, each call is different. There’s huge variability in our jobs — or so we like to think. But is it really true? Is it really true that we can’t plan our days, that there aren’t some standard practices or processes that we leverage? The job os the sales person is certainly not routine. Each sales situation is different, each customer situation is different–all this is true. But it’s important to understand the difference between the “content” of what we do and the structure of […]
Read MoreA sales person’s job is to sell–nothing surprising. More and more, however, it seems that things conspire against us, diverting us from engaging our customers. There’s some market research that puts the time available for selling at around 42%, but more and more, that figure seems optimistic. Several years ago, we did a study of a one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. With their B2B sales people, we found time available for selling had slipped just below 20%. More recently, with several large clients, we found time available for selling in the range of 22-34%. Regardless, which […]
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