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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
Removing Obstacles To Buying
One of the most important roles of the sales professional is to remove obstacles to the customer’s buying process. It’s a role that has always existed, but too often, we forget about it, focusing instead on presenting our products and solutions, or trying to persuade them to buy our stuff. Providing information, responding to customer questions, trying to convince them are really insufficient — both for our success as sales people and for the success of our customers. As sales people, we are trying to manage our sales process, aligning with the customer’s buying process. Ideally, we are moving through the […]
No Virginia, There Is No Santa Claus
Pardon my awkward paraphrasing of the famous “Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus,” line from the movie, Miracle on 34th street. As Thanksgiving approaches in the US, we can count on seeing that movie over and over until Christmas. In reality, the title of this post should be, No Sales Professional, There Is No ANSWER! As sales professionals, we always seem to be on the quest to find “THE ANSWER.” What is the thing that will suddenly cause people to answer their phones and be interested in talking to me? What is the thing that will enable me to […]
Performance Management Friday — CPOD
I’m shifting gears a little, today I’m focusing on a key sales management metric. It’s important for sales people to understand this–it’s part of the way senior managers look at organizations and how they invest in the sales function, sales people should understand this. The other shift, is this metric is more of a trailing measure, like sales and order performance. In previous posts, I’ve spent more time looking at leading measures. Cost Per Order Dollar (CPOD) is actually a number of measures, but they really look at the cost of selling. Depending on your company, this may be based […]
Does Sales 2.0 Make You A Better Sales Person?
The short answer is Yes–and–No. I sit through all sorts of conferences that promote great technologies and the great capabilities of the Sales 2.0 tools. If you believed the claims, or even discounted them by 50%, virtually every sales person should meet or exceed their quotas if they had access to Sales 2.0 technologies and tools. They seem to be the answer to sales manager’s prayers for quota attainment. Sales 2.0 tools offer tremendous capabilities to sales people. They enable us to dramatically leverage our time–making us much more efficient. Some of the tools (primarily the Business Analytics tools), enable […]
Being Present
The other day, someone called me. He wanted to pick my brain (feeble pickings) for some ideas and ask for some help. I was delighted with the call, both because he’s a prospect, and it was ego gratifying to be asked for the advice. But the call ended up being a waste of time–mine and the prospect’s. See, the problem was the multitasking being done by the prospect. He was in a car–fortunately not driving, other people were in the car, having a different conversation, which my prospect would interrupt our conversation, to inject a comment into the other conversation. There […]
Starting And Stopping
It’s always difficult to balance our selling activities. We’ve got a bunch of hot deals going, we drop everything else, focusing on those deals. There’s the new product launch, we spend all out time visiting customer on the new product. There’s the problem customer, we jump in trying to solve the problem and make them happy. The life of any sales person is one of constant juggling, re-prioritization. We have lots of things going, lots of things diverting our attention, we have to continue to shift where we spend our time. The thing that usually suffers during these times is […]