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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
Sales Performance Management — Two Key Levers
It’s approaching that time of year. I’m getting calls from clients: “Dave, we will be starting our planning process in September. We will have to commit to 2010’s numbers and budget, we will have to develop a commission plan that motivates our sales people to hit the goals….. We’re going to need your help.” These conversations got me to thinking about a mistake I think many organizations make in thinking about sales performance management. Too often, people make the mistake of thinking the cornerstone to sales performance management is the commission/incentive plan. “If we get the sale incentive plan right, […]
The Future Of Selling — Consultative, Solutions and Customer Focused? Deja Vu All Over Again?
I’m frustrated and a little impatient. As a profession, we seem to be doing the same thing over and over, making little progress. Sometimes, I feel like I’m Bill Murray waking up every morning in “Ground Hog Day.” All sorts of sales consultants, guru’s, and other self proclaimed experts (probably including me, if I’m honest) make a lot about being consultative, solutions and customer focused, value driven and even provocative in selling. These topics have been fodder for 100’s of books, 1000’s of articles and $ billions in sales training and other services. Virtually every self respecting sales professional talks […]
Stupid Twitter (and Social Media) Tricks
Many of you know I’m very enthusiastic about Twitter. I believe it has potential to be a very powerful tool for business professionals. Right now, we are just scratching the surface of potential applications. I’m seeing people use it in very clever ways for competitive and market insight. I read stories of amazing customer service (though one wonders why people had to resort to Twitter to get action and why the normal channels of customer service do not work). Through Twitter, I’ve met people I would never have had the opportunity to reach before. Our twitter relationships have expanded and […]
Would You Fire Your Top Sales Person?
A good friend (and top sales executive) and I were having an interesting conversation this morning. One of his regional VP’s was having great difficulty with one of the organization’s top sales people. We were talking about what to do about the sales person. The issue was that the sales person was refusing to have anything to do with the company’s CRM system. Despite constant reminders (accompanied with training, etc.) the sales person would not update the CRM system. The sales person would do some nominal updates, but not provide the information expected of each sales person in managing the […]
Are You Still Relevant To Your Customers?
Over the past week, I have had several conversations and a common theme kept coming up: “How do we stay relevant to our customers?” Since the crash of the economy, the projects we were working on, the things we were doing are no longer important to many of our customers. Our customers no longer want to talk to us. I have to admit I’ve struggled a little with this notion — how did we become irrelevant? In a conversation with a great sales executive this morning, it all became crystal clear: We become irrelevant to our customers when we stop […]
Do You Know Your Customer’s Value Proposition? What Are You Doing To Help Them Deliver It?
We know that a clear differentiated value proposition is critical to sales success. Over the past month, I have been writing about various aspects of developing communicating and delivering differentiated value to your customers. I’ll stay on the same theme, but take a slightly different direction. How many sales professionals understand the core value propositions of their customers? Do we know how our customers present their value to their customers and differentiate themselves from their competitors? Most good sales people have a pretty good idea of this. Now, here’s the twist—what do you do to help your customers deliver on […]