Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
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, […]
Start With The End In Mind
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about, We Keep Missing Our Forecast, Deals Keep Slipping. Much of the reason we miss forecast dates and deals keep slipping can be attributed to two reasons: We don’t have a sales strategy and are acting purely in response mode. We develop our strategies backwards. I won’t spend much time on the first area–it’s simply inexcusable, it’s a formula for performance failure. If we don’t have a strategy, then we are driven by responding to the customer–or, more likely, being driven by the competitors sales strategy. In either case, we are offering no […]
Sales Training–Sustained Performance Or The Sugar High?
Every year, US companies invest $4-6 Billion in training (From a person who really knows, Dave Stein, CEO of ESResearch). This includes internally developed training as well as that procured through the training companies. It’s a huge amount of money, yet most of that money is wasted, Dave Stein would say, the ROI of training is negative–that is it costs more than the value we get from it. It’s those darn sales training vendors! Well actually, probably not–responsible training companies and trainers are doing a lot to measure the impact of their training programs and are producing very important results. […]