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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
Strategic Thinking, Getting The Big Picture
I’ve been participating in an interesting conversation at Focus.com— “What are some non-selling skills that sales reps need to master?” Leanne Hoagland-Smith made some important observations. One of those is the importance of Strategic Thinking. Leanne’s right, but we don’t talk about it very much. I think there are a couple of aspects to Strategic Thinking, first–how sales professionals manage their opportunities, time, and territories. Second, how we engage our customers in thinking about their businesses. Both aspects are critical for high performing sales professionals. Managing Opportunities, Time, and Territories: Too often, sales people are interrupt driven or response oriented. […]
Opportunity Solving
As sales professionals, we learn a lot about problem solving. We focus on understanding our customers’ problems, determining their needs and presenting compelling solutions. We learn to identify and quantify the customer’s pain and seek to eliminate it. We go from customer to customer trying to find those that have problems we can solve. This is a valuable activity for sales people. It’s easy to catch our customer’s attention–they are probably already aware of the problem, hopefully, they have recognized the pain, and are pursuing solutions. But I wonder if we miss an opportunity to better serve our customers, while […]
Personal Productivity-CRM and Sales 2.0, Critical For Success!
On the eve of Salesforce.com’s annual user meeting, Dreamforce, somehow it seems appropriate to talk about tools. Before I get into that, if you are at Dreamforce, it would be great to meet! I’ll be there Tuesday and Wednesday–just tweet me at @davidabrock or email me at dabrock@excellenc.com. As large as Moscone Center is, I’m sure we will find each other. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post: CRM, The Biggest Sales Productivity Drain In 10 Years. It wasn’t about CRM, but many of you asked my opinion (more on the results of that post later). I’ll take […]
Performance Metric Friday – Compressing Your Sales Cycle
Last week, I wrote about Pipeline Flow and Velocity. A good measure of the flow is to look at the sales cycle in days, and whether opportunities are stalled in certain stages. But the sales cycle is one of the most powerful personal productivity metrics available to sales people. Focusing on reducint the sales cycle can dramatically improve productivity. Two tools for compressing the sales cycle are your sales process and the sales call plan. Let’s look at how we might leverage each to drive tremendous reductions in the sales cycle. The Sales Process (or from the customer perspective the […]
Why Do Sales Managers Exist?
I know, I know, this title will create a deluge of comments from sales people and others suggesting sales managers shouldn’t exist. We’ll probably get variations of the 200 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean joke. But I think many managers’ don’t really know what their job is–or may lose their way in the crush of every day crises. Likewise, many sales people may not understand or leverage their managers appropriately To my mind, the sole reason sales managers exist is to manage performance. It’s to assure each person on their team is achieving the highest levels of performance and […]
It’s Just A Numbers Game
I was really busy, my time was filled. I start each day with my list. I dialed 100 numbers, 80 were voicemails, 15 hung up on me, 4 listened, 1 said he’d see me. Excited, I grabbed my brochures to rush to the meeting. Didn’t know what the customer did, but I’d done 100’s of sales calls before, I figured I could wing it. I started to present, gave him the brochures, but he asked lot of questions, I didn’t have the answers. Told him I’d get back to him. Tried getting another appointment, took 3 weeks. But my manager […]