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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 Metric Friday – Pipeline Flow/Velocity
This is the second in my continuing series on Personal Performance Metrics. Last week, I wrote about determining your Ideal Pipeline Volume. Knowing the number of deals you need to be working in order to make you number is one of the most important things for each sales person (and manager) to track. There’s a problem with this, however. if you have the right number of deals in your funnel–but they aren’t moving, then you just won’t make your number. You can’t just be moving deals into the pipeline or funnel, they have to be moving through the pipeline . […]
Sales People, We Need To Be More Pushy!
I can imagine any buyer encountering this post is going to groan. The last thing customers need is a pushy sales person. We know the type. After the friendly, “Howdy,” or “Hello,” as soon as possible, the conversation shifts to “I want to sell you something,” or “I need a sale,” or “When am I getting the order?” The last thing we need is a sales person trying to sell us something we don’t want or need. We don’t want to waste our time with sales people who only care about the order or their commission checks. That kind of […]
CRM, The Biggest Sales Productivity Drain In 10 Years!
Hold on, before you react to this title, take a moment to understand! Talking about CRM and its impact on productivity is a lightning rod for commenters. The comments will be split—those in wild agreement with the title, and those in disagreement–thinking I’m irresponsible. But this blog post actually has nothing to do with CRM. It’s actually an experiment, I think I know the result, but I’ll report back to you in a couple of weeks. See, my blog is posted in many locations–on a number of social media sites, in a variety of LinkedIn groups, the title will inevitably […]
Relationships And Partnerships
In the past month, I’ve written some articles on Relationships and Partnering: “We Want To Be Your Partner,” , “Relationships Don’t Get You The Order,” and “On Collaboration and Partnering.” Also, my ebook, Creating Effective Strategic Partnerships, has stirred up some offline discussions. I’ve noticed some confusion in the concepts. Developing relationships is important in sales, business, and life. While there is some overlap in how we develop relationships and developing partnerships, they are not the same. As sales professionals, I think it’s important to be clear about what we are really trying to achieve. More importantly, I think it’s important […]
Patterns — Are We Recognizing Those That Help Us?
Our lives are dominated by patterns–some of them are habits. Patterns are the results of things we do or that are happening around us. For example, there may be certain things we do in certain circumstances, with certain people that create an outcome or result. Every time those things coincide in time, similar results happen. They could be great results, they could be bad results. Patterns are a part of everything we do, though we may not be conscious of them. Sometimes we talk about patterns as habits–good or bad. When we do certain things, they produce certain results. Great […]
How Well Do You Understand Your Customer’s Business?
We know our products, our competition, our companies well. But this isn’t what counts for our customers–sure they want sales people who understand the products they sell, but what they really want is sales people that understand them–their companies and businesses. Yet I’m constantly amazed how little too many sales people know about their customers. They know them at a surface level, but they don’t really understand them and their businesses. This keeps us at a distance and makes it difficult to really connect and engage our customers. It doesn’t take a lot of time to understand our customers’ businesses, […]