Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
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 […]
We Are Who We Hire
The other day I received a call from a troubled CEO. He ran a small company. “My sales people aren’t producing results! My sales manager is worthless! Can you help me straighten this out?” After asking a few questions and probing a little further, I politely declined, I made some excuse and suggested he find someone else. I didn’t take the project because as I spoke to him, I discovered the root problem was the CEO. Yes, there was a problem with the people. They didn’t have the skills, they didn’t have the attributes, there were a lot of problems. […]
Performance Management Friday — It’s Not About The Numbers
Today, I want to take a pause in this series. Over the past couple of months, each Friday, we’ve looked at different performance metrics. We’ve focused on establishing numbers and goals for these metrics. It’s worth taking some time to reconfirm what we are doing and why. Too often, I see sales people and managers making mistakes–everything is about the number or goal itself. The focus becomes–have we made our weekly telephone call goal? Have we met our target for the right number of meetings? When the focus starts to be on achieving the goal, then things can start going […]