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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
So Much Has Changed, So Much Is The Same
This past week, in New York, I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Mack Hanan. Mack is the author of Consultative Selling, originally published in 1970. Whenever I’m in New York, Mack and I get together to talk about the state of the profession. I started my sales career in the late 70’s. In that time, so much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same. Customers were busy then–they are still very busy. Though, in reality, I do think they are busier today than in the late 70’s. Continued cutback’s, the “leaning” of organizations, fewer resources–in hindsight, […]
I Don’t Have Time For Social Media!
The other day I was having dinner with a close friend. He’s the President of a division of a company. Eventually, the conversation got around to social media (is it something about me?). He said, “Dave, I just don’t get it, you keep talking about social media and how important it is, but I just don’t get it, I don’t have time for it, my customers aren’t using it. As we continued our conversation, he started saying, “I don’t have time to blog, I don’t have time to read blogs—even yours—and I really like your stuff (my ego was bruised […]
Reinforce And Enhance Your Sales Training With Product Training
The other day, my friend Kelley Robertson wrote an outstanding article: Is Your Sales Training Putting Your Sales Team At Risk? The article prompted me to think about: Why is product and sales training separated? What would happen if we integrated our sales methodologies and training into our product training? Companies invest lots of time and money in developing product training with every new product they launch. Usually, this training focuses on training the sales person on the product features, functions, speeds and feeds. Often, it includes competitive positioning, sometimes it includes elementary objection handling. Usually the training focuses on what […]
Metrics–The Secret Weapon Of Sales Managers??
Several days ago I wrote: The Most Used, Useless Metric In Sales. At the same time, I posed a question in LinkedIn asking people their opinions on the worst metric in sales. I was surprised by many of the responses. They included quota and revenue targets in every form–monthly, quarterly, annual. They included pipeline metrics, many variations of activity metrics and lots of others. Some of the metrics were very bad, many were simply bureaucratic reporting-having little to do with assessing sales performance, some represented micromanagement on the part of managers. What surprised me were the number of mentions of […]
“How Can I Help You — But First Let Me Tell You About Me”
My friend, Ardath Albee, and I were commiserating the other day. We see so many misguided approaches, whether they are sales people, marketers, individuals. They know the theory–yes, they’re supposed to be customer focused. They know they are supposed to talk about customer needs, problems, goals. They know they should focus on solving customer problems by proposing great solutions. But, to often it’s not like that. Just after the words, “how can I help you,” or “what are your needs,” leave their mouths — before we have a chance to respond — they go on and say, “but let me tell you about our products,” or “let me […]
The Sales Forecast, An “Informed Guess”
Several days ago, I wrote a post, The Most Used — Useless Metric In Sales. It’s generated quite a bit of discussion in the various sites where it appeared. In the post, I attacked the weighted probabiliy — based on progress through the sales cycle (you know –Qualified is something like 25%, Discovery, 50%, Proposal 75%, and Closing 100%). A series of discussions on sales forecasting started, so I thought I would toss more wood on the fire. Accurate sales forecasts are critical—not just for sales, but for the entire organizattion. Resources, funds, schedules, expectations are set, based on the […]