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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
Steeling Myself For The Aftermath Of DreamForce
It’s not just an Dreamforce occurrence, it happens with every conference I attend. I’m now having to deal with the aftermath of participating in these conferences. It’s kind of ironic, whether it’s DreamForce, the Sale 2.0 Conferences, anything on improving the effectiveness and productivity for sales people and organizations, the discussions and engagement at the conference is always enlightening. As one might expect, much of the talk at DreamForce was around engaging customers in new and innovative ways. There were great discussions and presentations about creating new conversations, about nurturing prospects with timely and meaningful communications, about driving new meaning […]
Will You Let Me Buy, Rather Than Trying To Sell To Me!
Today, I was doing some research on upgrading a product I currently used. I wasn’t sure about what would be included in the new release, consequently, wondering whether I should upgrade or not. I visited the web site, was struggling with the information on the website. While they kept wanting me to buy leveraging buy buttons and pop-ups, I struggled to find the information about the changes in this software. Then the, “Do You Want To Chat” pop-up came up. I decided to go for it. It asked for my name, email address. Having been through this before, I knew […]
Finding The Time
Last week, while at Dreamforce, I had a conversation over coffee with a relatively new sales manager. He was excited about the job and the opportunity to move forward in his sales career. We talked about how he spent his time. It seemed to be a flurry of activity. He wanted to go on sales calls with his people, feeling he could contribute to moving deals forward. As part of the management team, he was called to participate in any number of meetings–budget reviews, planning meetings, forecasts reviews, reviewing reports, creating reports — the list went on. Somehow, the sheer […]
Performance Management Friday — Funnel Balance
On previous Friday’s, I’ve written about Ideal Pipeline Volume, Flow/Velocity, and Sales Cycle. All are important to making sure you will make your numbers and perform as well as possible. Another related area to assess is Funnel Balance. Simply, Funnel Balance is having an appropriate distribution of opportunities at all stages of the sales cycle. Another way people may look at Funnel Balance is when they refer to the shape of the funnel. Funnel Balance enables us to balance the short term, tactical, with the longer term. As sales people, we are focused on making our numbers–today, this week, this […]
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 […]