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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
Who Is Your Customer?
On the surface, this may seem an obvious question. It’s been one that has been consuming me over the past two days. I’ve had the privilege of participating as the keynote speaker at a conference of investors and start-up entrepreneurs in Paris the past couple of days. It’s been fascinating to hear of great product and technologies covering a wide range of B2B and B2C solutions. Each entrepreneur is filled with passion about what they are doing. Each has done a tremendous business analysis, they know their competitors, they have done sophisticated market sizing and market analysis. They’ve done P&L […]
Activity And Progress
We confuse activity and progress, unfortunately too often focusing on activity rather than progress. We are constantly busy–we work 50-60 hour weeks, we are constantly in communication–doing emails, texting, tweeting, on phone calls. We are constantly in meetings, our calendars are filled with back to back meetings–with barely any time to think or prepare. We are always doing something, but are we doing the right things? Are we doing the things that are most important and most effective to achieving our goals? Sometimes we do activities when we don’t know what to do–but we need to fill our time. Sometimes […]
Good Revenue And Bad Revenue
There’s the old — and still good — maxim in sales, follow the money. As sales people, we continue to chase the money. We’re measured on revenue, our job is to grow revenue, we focus on orders. When we qualify opportunities, one of the key things we look for is funding. Do they have the budget? Are they willing to obtain the funding? If the answer to this is “Yes,” along with our other criteria, it’s like a shark smelling blood–we’re off–we want to win the deal, we’re going to compete and get the order, get the revenue. Hold on […]
What’s Wrong With Strategic Accounts?
We embrace our strategic accounts—they are our most important customers. They may be our largest customers, perhaps they represent the thought leaders in the industry – helping us acquire more share within an industry. We pay a lot of attention to our strategic account plans. We have our annual strategic account planning sessions. We look at what we are going to do with the account, how we are expanding our relationships, how we will grow the account, what resources we will commit, how we will develop new customer relationships. In many organizations, our strategic accounts represent the majority of our […]
Walking Away
Walking away from a bad deal is tough. Too often, we don’t have the courage to do this–the pressure for revenue is so high that we get ourselves into situations that are bad. One of my clients just did this. We had been talking about a specific opportunity. They were really struggling with the customer. Early in the sales process, they were concerned about the customer and their ability to meet the customer’s expectations for the project. Through the customer buying process, they kept trying to address the critical success issues with the customer. While the customer kept nodding their […]
Sales As A Special Case Of Project Management
It seems all professions have their own languages, short hand, and ways of communicating that is a complete mystery to everyone else. Recently, I was meeting with people in the Healthcare Industry (not doctors), and my head was spinning trying to keep up with the conversation. Likewise, I had a discussion with some Semiconductor Process Engineers, and I didn’t have the “secret decoder ring,” so I was struggling to add value to the conversation. (All this argues for business acumen training for sales people–but that’s a different post.) In sales we have the same shorthand, we talk about selling processes, […]