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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
It’s The New Year For Our Customers, As Well!
As we put together our strategies for the New Year, most of our focus will be on ourselves–what are our quotas, how do we earn the most money, what are the expectations of us in the coming year? We have kick-off meetings to go to, new initiatives, new priorities, a lot of stuff. Much of January is spent focusing on our company and what we and the organization needs to achieve. But as sales people, we have an opportunity, our customers are undertaking the same exercise, they are doing the same things with their sales people and with everyone in […]
Performance Management Friday — New Year Baggage
It’s the end of the year. The New Year often represent a time for a fresh start. We have new goals and quotas. New initiatives and priorities will be launched in each of the thousands of Kickoff meetings that occur around the world. We may have committed to some New Year’s resolutions. Yet, it’s really only a New Year from the point of view of the calendar. We each come into the New Year with a lot of baggage. Deals in process, all the things that were on our to-do lists that haven’t gotten to done. With the New Year, […]
Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places
Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas. They are driven for improvement and innovation. But too often, our efforts are stymied. It’s hard to improve or innovate. Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places. When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?” Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!” Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.” When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel: “Ideas […]
Putting A “Face” To Our Customers
As sales people, we work with customers every day. We see them, we’re in their offices, we talk to them. They’re very real (sometimes too real) to us. Customers–each of them—are very important to us. Sometimes, it’s frustrating, people in our companies don’t seem to be as customer focused as we are. Many of the people we work with aren’t as sensitive to customers as we are. Part of it is they are busy doing their jobs, part of it may be they may not understand how what they do impacts the customer experience, part of it is simply that […]
Performance Management Friday — Quota
I’ve been writing this series of posts on metrics, and how sales people and managers leverage metrics to help maximize our performance for a number of months. I’ve never written about Quota measurements–the “grand-daddy” of all sales measurements. Part of the reason is that it’s something that’s pretty well understood (or so I thought), the other is that it’s a trailing or historic metric. It’s difficult to use on a day to day or week to week basis to monitor and improve our performance. I thought I’d write about Quota for a couple reasons. As we approach the Fiscal Year […]
Buying Has Nothing To Do With The Product We Sell!
We constantly get it wrong, as sales people we focus on our products and what we are selling. As “sophisticated” sales people, we wrap some nice language around it and focus on the solution we sell, hiding the fact that we are focused on selling a product. The real problem is we are focused on selling. Our customers should be focused on buying, but they really aren’t, they’re focused on solving problems or addressing opportunities. Most of our customers’ difficulty in solving problems or addressing opportunities has nothing to do with the solution. But, again, that’s what we focus on. […]