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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
Performance Management Friday — Win/Loss Analysis
Win/Loss Analysis is critical in helping us improve our results. But there are a couple of perspectives in win/loss analysis I think are important in driving performance improvement and improving our ability to win — hopefully ultimately just doing win reviews 😉 There are two different perspectives of wins and losses that I’d like to discuss. One is the fairly typical win/loss review that should be conducted with every major opportunity–particularly for every major loss. The other is a broader view of wins and losses–looking at overall trends and patterns across the broad number of opportunities. Win/Loss Deal Reviews: After […]
Order Taker Or Solution Creator?
The other day Seth Godin offered a short post on Sold or Bought. It offered an interesting perspective, but he didn’t go far enough on selling. We can further refine this view in a number of ways. One of the major splits I see is sales people who are really order takers versus solution creators. Order takers focus on their product. They can be very customer service oriented. But the quality of their interaction is very different from a solution creator. In prospecting, they call the customer asking about their use of widgets, their satisfaction with their current widgets and […]
Who Should We Be Coaching?
I’ve been reading a number of different posts on the topic of “Who Should We Be Coaching?” There seem to be a variety of views, most of which I struggle with. Some say focus on the middle, suggesting the return on coaching time for both high performers and low performers is not high. Some focus on the high performers and middle. In general the low performers lose out. I’m struggling with some of the ideas, these ideas, frankly, I think it’s the manager’s job to be coaching everyone. This doesn’t mean each person requires the same amount of time in […]
The Importance Of Push And Pull In Sales
There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull. I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels. It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process. Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided. Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a […]
Hearing What We Want To Hear
Sales people are eternally optimistic–it’s a great strength of sales people and critical. After all, we get a lot of “no’s,” if we let them stop us, we would never achieve anything. Yet sometimes our optimism is our downfall. We tend to accept things that fit “our picture,” not challenging them. We tend to listen selectively, hearing what we want to hear, not necessarily hearing what is really being said. I see this all the time. I’m conducting a deal review, the salesperson reviews what’s going on, but something doesn’t ring right. I often say, “this really doesn’t make sense, […]
Not Worth The “Paper It’s Written” On
Companies spend billions of dollars each year in training people on sales and related methodologies. Billions more are spent on tools like CRM systems and others that help improve sales people’s effectiveness and efficiency. Yet much of that is simply wasted. Too often, sales people simply don’t use the tools that have been implemented. For example, virtually every sales methodology has some sort of oppotunity planning or strategy process, or account planning process, or call planning process. Most of the CRM tools have capabilities to enter opportunity, account, territory plans. Too often, I get involved in an assessment of an […]