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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
What Are You Worth To Your Customer?
Today, Anthony Iannarino and I had a discussion on Focus.com on the Perils of Discounting. As an aspect of the conversation, we started talking about the value sales people bring to their customers. I’ve maintained the value the sales team brings to the customer is the most under-appreciated, yet most differentiated and sustainable aspects of a value proposition. Sales people don’t get it, consequently don’t get their customers to appreciate and “buy it.” Great sales people bring tremendous value to their customers–this value has the potential to surpass any discount or cheaper pricing a competitor can propose. Great sales people bring […]
Critical Closing Skills
Every once in a while a sales manager calls me, “I have a sales person who can’t close, can you help him?” Sometimes I get a call, “I need to improve my team’s closing skills?” I’m always suspicious of these calls. Closing is never the real problem. The managers are reacting to a sales person’s inability to win deals and get business, but it’s never really about closing. Deals really aren’t won or lost based on our slick closing skills or great technique, they are won and lost much earlier. Deals are won and lost in qualifying. Too often, sales […]
Earning Our Way — No More Excuses!
It distresses me, but too often I encounter people with “entitlement” attitudes. They express this in various ways, “I work really hard, why don’t I get the promotion?” “I put in a lot of effort on this proposal, why didn’t I get the deal?” “I’ve worked for this company for years, why are they treating me this way?” The list goes on, but generally the themes are focus on effort, longevity, loyalty, and often dwelling on past contributions, not current performance. But in encountering high performers or great leaders, the attitudes–and resultant actions are completely different. These people don’t focus […]
Performance Management And Accountability
Years ago, a manager used to tell us, “Your increases will become effective when you do.” It was a funny way of reminding us our compensation was linked to our performance. If we didn’t achieve our performance objectives, we couldn’t expect increases in our compensation. We talk about accountability a lot, but we tend to gloss over the consequence sides of accountability. Being accountable for our performance goals not only means we do everything possible to achieve them and that we have internalized and own them. It also means we understand and accept the consequences of not achieving those goals. Every […]
No Way To Prospect
I opened the email: “David, Do you give product reviews? [First Name Withheld]” Hmmm, I thought. An unusual approach, is this SPAM? No introduction, no identification of who is making the request, just a first name. Applied my detective skills to the email (one of those with a first name and no last name). This was really odd. Decided I’d play along, I responded, “It depends.” Nothing else. A few minutes later, “David, So you need a story hook, how about finding a hook from one or our customers…. [Product Name] is an amazing tool for creating business cases” A couple […]
Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures
For the past several weeks, I’ve been focusing on various aspects of the funnel/pipeline. We’ve explored different measures or KPI’s that can be used to monitor personal performance and help sales professionals assess ways to improve performance. Let’s leave the funnel/pipeline for a while, and look at some other things that may be helpful. Activity levels are important. Yeah, I know many of you are groaning in anticipation. Too many of us have been subjected to arbitrary or meaningless activity measures. Whether its the number of daily outbound prospecting calls you have to make, the number of customer meetings every […]