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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
Curiosity — A Critical Trait Of Great Sales People
A trait I don’t hear much about, but one that I think is critical for sales people is curiosity. When you are recruiting–do you look for curiosity? Think about it. We have to be students of our customers’ businesses–their customers, their markets, their competitors. We have to understand their business strategies, dreams, and goals. We have to look at our customers’ businesses, discovering new opportunities for improvement, looking at different ways to do things. We have to be curious about our customers as individuals–what drives them, what are they interested in, what are they trying to achieve, how do they […]
Follow-Up
Follow-Up, a simple concept, but one which too many managers fail to execute. Yet is is probably one of the most important elements of successful coaching. When we coach our people, one of the critical elements is establishing the next steps and actions to be taken. They may be tactical–about a deal, they may be improving the person’s capabilities or performance. We want to see progress and change. But it’s insufficient to drop it there, we need to follow up, both to see the outcome and to leverage the outcome to reinforce the coaching discussions. Coaching is an ongoing dialog, […]
Sometimes The Customer Just Needs To Decide!
I was reviewing a sales situation with a client earlier today. The sales person had done a fantastic job in managing the sales process. He had dealt with all the stakeholders, the competitors had presented their case, the advantages for my customer were compelling. Everyone was recommending my client’s solution. Everything was in the hands of the decision-maker—and it’s been that way for a month. The decision-maker just isn’t making a decision. We’ve looked at all the issues–the business case is very strong–so good that every week the decision is deferred, the customer continues to lose a lot of money—so […]
Shifting The Curve
I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management. At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.” Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve. There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance. Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.” These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of […]
Agenda’s
No, today’s post isn’t about some esoteric view of people’s agendas–how we discern them, how we leverage them. This is a rare post for me–it’s about the simple issue of having an Agenda–for meetings that is. I’m amazed at the number of meetings I’m asked to participate in that have no published agenda. Sure everyone knows the topic and general issues, though, 85% of the meeting sales people ask to have with me, they appear to have no structured agenda–at least nothing they have communicated with me. The written agenda is one of the simplest, yet most powerful tools available […]
Are Your Deals Slipping?
One of the biggest problems sales people face is their deals slipping. We forecast a certain close date, then it slips, and slips, and slips, and …….. Things keep coming up, we push the close date out, then more things come up and we get into this seemingly endless cycle until the deal closes. Sometimes these slips in close date can’t be avoided. The customer keeps deferring the decision, we have little control over it. But too often, I think these slips are the result of bad deal strategies — and the sales person is responsible for managing the deal […]