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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
Leaping To Solutions! Are We Solving The Right Problem?
Sales people are trained to be problem solvers — we ask questions, probe — once we find a problem we attack like a pit bull and don’t let go until we’ve wrestled the problem to the ground and gotten the order. So what’s the problem with that? Too often we leap to solutions before we understand what the “real problem” is. It’s a real problem, I wrote about it in a post almost a year ago: “The Evolving Role Of The Sales Person–The Sales Person As Diagnostician” It addresses the issue of sales people leaping to solutions and not solving the right […]
Always Be Recruiting!
Dave Kurlan wrote an outstanding post: Bench Strength – The Key To Replacing Salespeople. He mentioned that managers must always be recruiting. It’s such a simple concept, but I am constantly amazed at how few managers–at all levels do this. Here’s how the cycle goes. We have a bad performer in place, we worry about firing the person, because it leaves an open territory….too often we think coverage is more important than quality. Maybe the manager might start looking casually for someone, but the normal day to day events slow the process down, consequently nothing is done for too long. […]
80% of Customer Satisfaction Is Meeting Your Commitments — The Little One’s.
I’m sitting in my office–it’s 97 degrees in the office, I’m fuming, it’s been one of those weeks. I was traveling all week, thinking I was fortunate enough to miss the very hot weather we are having in Southern California (OK, some of you may think I am whining). On Friday, I called my wife, both air conditioning systems in the house had failed — we had just replaced them last October with completely new systems. I told her to call the air conditioner company to get out to the house. That evening, I called her again, “had they fixed the […]
The Most Used – Useless Metric In Sales!
For years I’ve been amazed by the number of very smart sales people and leaders who have a blind spot in forecasting. One of the top issues CEO’s, CFO’s, and even Chief Sales Officers have is forecast accuracy. One of the most used forecasting methodologies based on a “weighted revenue” approach. This approach takes the sum of all opportunities in the pipeline, multiplying the revenue for each opportunity by a probability factor. This makes sense statistically, it’s called expected revenue. For example, if you have a $100,000 sale and a 70% probability, the expected value of the sale is $70K — […]
Words Are Important In Sales
Words are important in sales! We’re always looking for the right word–the one that best conveys what we mean, the one that will immediately resonate with the customer, the one that cuts through everything else creating great clarity. Sometimes we use way too many words, confusing the customer–even people in our own organization and ourselves. Words are important–it’s a topic those of us at Sales Bloggers Union decided to tackle as an eBook, WordUp! We decided to tackle the words we thought were important in driving the highest levels of success in selling. To me, it is “Think.” It took […]
Shortcuts
It seems to be human nature to take shortcuts. We want results immediately, we don’t want to invest the effort normally required to achieve a goal. We somehow think that we are the exceptions to the rule–while others have to make an effort, somehow we are different and can avoid all the work and effort to achieve the result. In truth, sometimes shortcuts work. They probably work often enough, that we continue to pursue them. Shortcuts increase risk, very often profoundly. Every day we see examples from industries, organizations, and individuals–BP wanted to get a well in production faster. The finance industry wanted to […]