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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
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 […]
On Being Customer Centric
Customer Centricity is a hot topic these days. I get on my soapbox on Customer Focus, Customer Experience, How Buying Is Changing, and various aspects of being Customer Centric. As a result, I get a lot of calls and queries about being Customer Centric. To tell you the truth, many of them are very disturbing. They often go something like this (this composite, actually understates what I’ve experienced). Caller: My organization has to be more customer centric. Dave: Cool, what’s driving this initiative? Caller: My boss has told us we have to do this. Dave: OK, that’s interesting. Why does […]
Sales Goals Or Sales Process, Which Is Most Important?
Geoffrey James wrote an interesting article at BNET, Sales Goals vs. Sales Process: Which Is Most Important? Frankly, the question confuses me, it assumes that sales goals and sales process are mutually exclusive. Geoffrey seems conflicted, as well. Later, using the example of an Olympic athlete, he states, “For the Olympic athlete, the process leads naturally and progressively towards the goal.” The whole point of a sales process is that it is goal directed. The best sales processes represent the organization’s best experience in winning business–achieving goals. The only reason to have a sales process is because it provides us […]
You Lose Because Of What You Don’t Do
Over the past few days, I’ve been participating in a loss review with one of my clients. It was a painful loss, it was a major opportunity, with a prestigious customer. The winner would lock up the business for the foreseeable future. My client had been pursuing this opportunity for over a year. The sale was for a relatively complex piece of capital equipment. The support teams had done many demonstrations and tests, they had made modifications to the base software to support customer requirements. Through the entire process, they were neck to neck with the competition. In the end, they were even slightly […]