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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
Shoemaker’s Children??
The phone rings. I pick it up, it’s a sales person from a supplier of Sales Intelligence solutions. “Hi Dave, I’d noticed you were on our site, I’d like to talk to you about how your company can use Sales Intelligence to improve your impact,” he says. “We’ve found the more knowledgeable you are about the people you call, the better the result.” I respond, confused, “I’m not sure why you are calling, I know your solution, I’ve used your solution, I am a past customer.” “Oh,” responds the sales person, “I didn’t know.” Hmmm……….. There are the twice a […]
Performance Management Friday — % Leads Converted To Opportunities
In past posts, I’ve talked a lot about metrics within the traditional Sales Pipeline/Funnel, focusing on qualified opportunities. Today, too many of the sales people I speak to are “opportunity starved.” They don’t have a sufficient volume of opportunities to achieve their goal. One of the most important things sales people must do is focus on prospecting—finding and qualifying new opportunities. One of the most important prospecting metrics is the % of Leads Converted To Opportunities— (Leads Qualified And Converted To Opportunities)/(Total Leads Prospected). For many people this is a frightening number–I’ve seen some people needing to prospect up to […]
Who Is The Beneficiary Of Sales And Marketing Automation?
I had the privilege of participating in a fantastic roundtable at Focus.com today. It was “A Sales View Of Marketing Automation,” with three of the smartest sales and marketing people I know: Alex Shootman, Chief Revenue Officer of Eloqua, Thor Johnson of Team Thor Marketing, and Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group. It was a great discussion, be sure to listen to the recorded version. But it got me to thinking, there are endless discussion about sales and marketing technologies. There are constant debates on what do we get out of it. We want to make sure that sales and […]
Working On Trust
Trust is the cornerstone in developing healthy relationships,whether they be personal or professional. It’s particularly important in our effectiveness as sales people. However, there’s a lot of bad information about establishing and maintaining trust–both with your customers and within your organization. The launch of their new book: The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, gave me the opportunity to sit down and talk with my good friend Charlie Green and his co-author Andrea Howe to talk about key issues we face in being trustworthy. Dave: Charlie, you know my passion about the role of sales managers in coaching their teams in improving their effectiveness. […]
Do You Know What Should Be Keeping Your Customers Up At Night?
There it is, that old stand by question, “What keeps you up at night?” There lots of arguments about whether that’s the worst question one might ask in a sales call, but that’s not what this blog is about. The much more powerful concept is the ability of the sales person to engage the customer in a conversation about “What should be keeping them up at night?” Like us, our customers are overworked and time poor. Their days are consumed with just doing their jobs. Too often, they don’t get to think further ahead than the next day. They don’t […]
When Sales People Don’t Change?
“Selling has changed more in the past 3 years than in it’s cumulative history.” states Dave Stein of ESResearch. I couldn’t agree more, but would tinker with that a little, “Buying has changed more in the past 3 years than in the cumulative history of buying.” While it may seem a small point, I think it may more clearly illustrate the problem I think is happening in sales. Depending on which reports you read, this year only 38-52% of sales people will make their goals or quota. This is down dramatically from previous years. Undoubtedly, some of it can be […]