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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
Why Do Sales Managers Exist?
I know, I know, this title will create a deluge of comments from sales people and others suggesting sales managers shouldn’t exist. We’ll probably get variations of the 200 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean joke. But I think many managers’ don’t really know what their job is–or may lose their way in the crush of every day crises. Likewise, many sales people may not understand or leverage their managers appropriately To my mind, the sole reason sales managers exist is to manage performance. It’s to assure each person on their team is achieving the highest levels of performance and […]
It’s Just A Numbers Game
I was really busy, my time was filled. I start each day with my list. I dialed 100 numbers, 80 were voicemails, 15 hung up on me, 4 listened, 1 said he’d see me. Excited, I grabbed my brochures to rush to the meeting. Didn’t know what the customer did, but I’d done 100’s of sales calls before, I figured I could wing it. I started to present, gave him the brochures, but he asked lot of questions, I didn’t have the answers. Told him I’d get back to him. Tried getting another appointment, took 3 weeks. But my manager […]
Performance Metric Friday – Pipeline Flow/Velocity
This is the second in my continuing series on Personal Performance Metrics. Last week, I wrote about determining your Ideal Pipeline Volume. Knowing the number of deals you need to be working in order to make you number is one of the most important things for each sales person (and manager) to track. There’s a problem with this, however. if you have the right number of deals in your funnel–but they aren’t moving, then you just won’t make your number. You can’t just be moving deals into the pipeline or funnel, they have to be moving through the pipeline . […]
Sales People, We Need To Be More Pushy!
I can imagine any buyer encountering this post is going to groan. The last thing customers need is a pushy sales person. We know the type. After the friendly, “Howdy,” or “Hello,” as soon as possible, the conversation shifts to “I want to sell you something,” or “I need a sale,” or “When am I getting the order?” The last thing we need is a sales person trying to sell us something we don’t want or need. We don’t want to waste our time with sales people who only care about the order or their commission checks. That kind of […]
CRM, The Biggest Sales Productivity Drain In 10 Years!
Hold on, before you react to this title, take a moment to understand! Talking about CRM and its impact on productivity is a lightning rod for commenters. The comments will be split—those in wild agreement with the title, and those in disagreement–thinking I’m irresponsible. But this blog post actually has nothing to do with CRM. It’s actually an experiment, I think I know the result, but I’ll report back to you in a couple of weeks. See, my blog is posted in many locations–on a number of social media sites, in a variety of LinkedIn groups, the title will inevitably […]
Relationships And Partnerships
In the past month, I’ve written some articles on Relationships and Partnering: “We Want To Be Your Partner,” , “Relationships Don’t Get You The Order,” and “On Collaboration and Partnering.” Also, my ebook, Creating Effective Strategic Partnerships, has stirred up some offline discussions. I’ve noticed some confusion in the concepts. Developing relationships is important in sales, business, and life. While there is some overlap in how we develop relationships and developing partnerships, they are not the same. As sales professionals, I think it’s important to be clear about what we are really trying to achieve. More importantly, I think it’s important […]