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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’s Your Focus?
I work with dozens of organizations and hundreds to thousands of business professionals every year. Over time, I’ve noticed some important differences in the focus of many of these people and organizations. Some (too many) focus on avoiding failure, some focus on achieving success. Aren’t they the same? They actually can’t be more different. We frame our view of the world in very different ways, pose questions in different ways. develop very different strategies, take different risks. When your focus in on achieving success, you sometimes fail. But you learn from that failure, you apply those lessons to achieving success. […]
Performance Management Friday — Customer Retention/Customer Attrition
Usually it’s easier, and cheaper to sell to a current customer than to acquire a new customer. Monitoring customer retention and customer attrition is important. Ideally, 100% of our customers continue to see superior value in our products and services, and want to continue to be customers. There are a number of different ways to measure customer retention. In the simplest form, you want to look at the percent of customers that bought in some previous time period that buy this year. For example (Customers Buying This Year That Also Purchased Last Year)/(Customers That Bought Last Year) expressed as a percentage. For some […]
Giving Thanks
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. It will prompt the usual spate of posts about gratitude and appreciation, including this one. A special day like this forces us to pause and reflect. I, as do so many of us, have so much to be thankful for, and far too many people to express my gratitude. Clients and associates I am privileged to work with every day, this large community of people to exchange and share ideas, friends and neighbors. Most of all a wonderful family. My wife, parents, sisters, their husbands and children, my sister in law and her children–each […]
Are Your People Selling What They’re Supposed To Sell?
Let me open by posing a scenario then asking a question. Scenario: You have two sales people, each with $1 Million quotas. Each has done an outstanding job has sold $1.1 Million. One has done it by focusing exclusively selling one product line, the other has done it by selling the entire product line. Question: Which sales person is the better performer? Before you peek down in this blog post, what’s your answer? I pose this question a lot. Most of the time, the first answer people give is, “There is no difference, each person did the same and over achieved […]
Removing Obstacles To Buying
One of the most important roles of the sales professional is to remove obstacles to the customer’s buying process. It’s a role that has always existed, but too often, we forget about it, focusing instead on presenting our products and solutions, or trying to persuade them to buy our stuff. Providing information, responding to customer questions, trying to convince them are really insufficient — both for our success as sales people and for the success of our customers. As sales people, we are trying to manage our sales process, aligning with the customer’s buying process. Ideally, we are moving through the […]
No Virginia, There Is No Santa Claus
Pardon my awkward paraphrasing of the famous “Yes Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus,” line from the movie, Miracle on 34th street. As Thanksgiving approaches in the US, we can count on seeing that movie over and over until Christmas. In reality, the title of this post should be, No Sales Professional, There Is No ANSWER! As sales professionals, we always seem to be on the quest to find “THE ANSWER.” What is the thing that will suddenly cause people to answer their phones and be interested in talking to me? What is the thing that will enable me to […]