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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
“I Made A Mistake”
I had a great conversation with a remarkable executive the other day. We were talking about the sales strategies he had established for his organization. At one point, he made the comment, “I made a mistake.” At the time, it seemed like the best decision, but things hadn’t worked as he had anticipated. In our conversation, there were no excuses, no rationalization, just the simple statement, “I made a mistake.” We discussed why things hadn’t worked out the way he had hoped, what he had learned from it, and explored options for moving forward. It was a remarkable, unfortunately rare […]
Where’s “The Decisionmaker?”
That’s the $64K question for all sales people. Who’s the decision-maker and how do we get access to her? Conventional sales wisdom tells us to focus on the top, prowling the halls of the executive suite, trying to develop relationships with the CxO. Finding that decision-maker, persuading him that we have the right solution and getting a favorable decision is the “Holy Grail” for sales people. But in complex B2B decisions, it’s seldom that simple and rarely an appropriate strategy. Too often, we forget about all the stakeholders involved in the decision. People responsible for the implementation, people who will […]
Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share
This week we’ll focus on a metric critical to major, global or key account managers. For those of you with broad territories and dozens to hundreds of customers, this metric is probably of secondary importance. The term ” wallet share” comes from the banking industry. Typically it meant, how many of the bank’s product lines were you consuming. For example, did you have checking, savings, credit cart, mortgage, loans, credit lines, and so forth. Today, the term wallet share generally refers to the share of the customer’s purchases in your category you are obtaining. For example if the customer is […]
Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
Where do we find new deals? How do we get customers energnized about the deals we are talking to them about? How do we unstick stalled deals? What about those “no decisions?” These are the top issues I hear from sales professionals every day. They’re tough challenges. I think one of the root causes of these challenges is the conversations we have with our customers (if we even are having a conversation, rather than pitching). We’re having the wrong conversations at the wrong time! Here’s where these conversations go off target. We qualify our customer, start our discovery process with […]
When Do You Stop Qualifying?
Today I was asked the question, “Do you have to keep qualifying through the sales process?” It’s a good question–one that is too often ignored. Before answering this, let me back up a moment and start at the beginning of the sales process. I’ve often written that we make a mistake in the qualification phase of the sales process–we focus on qualifying the customer. We are finding all the excuses to keep a deal in our funnel and pursue it as a sales opportunity. Rather than qualifying, we need to focus on disqualifying–we need to focus on finding the deals […]
Performance Management Can’t Be Delegated Or Abdicated!
A key aspect of the manager’s job is performance management. Surprisingly, I seem to run across a fair number “managers” that don’t own this responsibility. They don’t do it, or try to delegate it so someone else. There are various categories of managers that really don’t manage performance: The manager, trapped behind a desk, managing paperwork, internal bureaucracy, not connected with the field. There’s the “super-person” manager–the one’s that know how to do deals better then anyone else. Rather than coaching and strategizing, they swoop in, pushing the sales person to the side, and do the deal themselves. There’s the […]