Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
We’re having a terrific discussion about metrics at Future Selling Institute. One of the things I’ve realized is there is something missing in the way we think about and leverage metrics. As sales professionals, we’re used to measuring and being measured. We’re focused on our quota’s and goal attainment. As sales leaders, metrics are important in analyzing the performance of our teams, people, and organization. We use metrics to assess performance, and coach improvement. This is very important, but I think each of us, whether we are individual contributors or leaders miss a key thing about metrics–using them as a […]
Read MoreI’m a tremendous fan of many of the Sales 2.0 tools. I think any high performing sales person must exploit these tools to the fullest. They enable people to magnify their effectiveness greatly, as well as improving their efficiency. At the same time, I really worry about these tools, they beccome crutches and faciliators of stupid behaviors, enabling people to make tragic mistakes at the speed of light. It’s not the tools I worry about, it’s how sales people utilize them. Too often, I’m seeing people apply them blindly–with terrible results. Some true–but almost unbelievable stories: Just because It’s On […]
Read MoreWhat’s the difference between good sales people or sales managers and truly great ones? I guess we can come up with lots of lists, but I think they reduce to one thing. The truly great sales people and sales manager always focus on getting better, the good ones are content with being good. It’s a subtle, but important difference. It has a profound impact on performance. The great sales people and sales managers are already high performers–but they don’t settle for that, they know they can get better. They are constantly seeking to learn knew things. They see every training […]
Read MoreThere are few sales professionals that would argue with “A question is more powerful than a statement.” I’ve spent a lot of time at this blog, and there are hundreds of other articles on the power of great questions in sales. It helps us understand the customer, it helps them know that we are concerned about them and want to understand what they are trying to achieve. It aligns us and bonds us to the customer. It’s critical for our effectiveness as sales professionals. Until we understand what they need, what they are trying to achieve, we can’t agree on […]
Read MoreWe’re all busy. We run from meeting to meeting, we’re busy doing research, reports, working on social media…. The list can go on. No one suffers from a lack of activity—the key to sales productivity, though, is are we focusing on the right activities? Ideally, as sales people, we want to spend as much of our time in customer/sales related activities as possible. Recently, I heard a piece of data, roughly 40% of sales people’s time is spent working with customers in sales related activities. Frankly I believe that probably high, I think the time is significantly less than that. […]
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