Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Sales Performance
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
Results are about performance. Sustained great results is about maximizing performance over time. The foundation to great performance lies in purpose, culture, values, and leadership. Performing well s developing the right strategies, the right organizational structures, putting the right talent in place, identifying the right processes, programs, systems, tools and metrics. Finally, it is about consistent execution. It’s about organizational and individual habit formation.
We work with clients in all aspects of maximizing performance. Whether it is developing strategies, recommending programs, putting the right structures and talent in place. Developing and implementing the right processes, systems and tools.
It may involve assessing current capabilities, both organizational and individual. Or assessing market and industry changes, developing recommendations for responding to those changes.
Finally, it’s about consistent execution. Training people in what needs to be done and best practices in doing these things. Measuring progress, putting corrective actions in place.
We are a collection of operations focused executives, working with our clients in developing their strategies, putting everything in place to implement those strategies, developing and supporting the change management efforts, supporting and refining the execution, then continuing to refine these to drive constant improvement.
Our goal is to help individuals and organizations to OutPeform their competition.
Sales Performance Posts
Success Is Our Greatest Obstacle To Growth!
This is inspired by a post from my good friend, Tobia La Marca. He wrote The Mastery Trap, it’s outstanding, please read it. As I reflected on his article, I started thinking, “This is about how we define success.” I moved on to the idea: “We confuse being successful with being as good as we […]
Can Your People Talk With Your Customer?
Reading the title, many of you may be scratching your heads, thinking, “Dave, of course they talk to customers. We measure it every day. What’s the deal?” There are two critical words in this title. The first is “Can,” the second is “With.” Let me start with “with” before I address can. I know it’s […]
The Cost Of Judgment
I struggled to write this post. At first I tried to parse good, bad, abdicated judgment. The cost of compliance versus the cost of developing our capabilities. It became a very complex discussion, something resembling ROI analysis, except without the numbers. The argument became very abstract. After a few drafts, I finally realized I was […]
Time Isn’t The Scarce Resource
For years, we have treated time as the scarce resource. For most sellers and leaders, the scarce resource is judgment and attention. Stated differently, we have misunderstood what productivity means. I’m deluged daily with prospecting emails and things in my feed about “saving time.” For years, we’ve had increasing automation, mostly oriented to saving time. […]
Sensemaking V2.0
For years, we’ve known our customers are overwhelmed with information. Where information scarcity had been a problem, which caused customers to invite sellers into their offices, for the past 10-15 years, it’s been the opposite. Customers are overwhelmed. Sensemaking was created for sellers to help customers deal with the information overload. It enabled sellers to […]
Mindsets, Behaviors, Judgment…..
In “Is Good Enough Good Enough,” I introduced the fundamental mindsets and behaviors for sales excellence. What do these have to do with developing our judgment? In some sense, it’s a chicken and egg discussion. Our mindsets and behaviors impact our judgment, and our judgments impact our mindsets and behaviors. It constantly runs both ways. […]
“You Can’t Handle The Truth!”
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is in A Few Good Men. It’s Jack Nicholson on the stand shouting, “You can’t handle the truth!” It came up the other day when Bob Apollo and I were talking about truth, honesty, and trust in business, sales, and society (we tend to wander in our conversations.) […]
Leadership And Judgment
We’ve all been in the meeting. It’s a standard deal review. The manager sits with the seller, both looking at the dashboard, rather than each other. The are reviewing the deal, MEDDICC steps checked off, process being followed. Maybe a few questions about what the customer is saying, and how the salesperson is handling things. […]
Stop Wasting Seller Time On Forecasting, Start Spending It On Winning!
If I look at my feeds, too many conversations with clients and others, we have an obsession on forecasting. I’m constantly astounded by the amount of time sellers spend in forecast reviews with their managers, and management meetings around the forecast. I wonder if it is time well spent. I wonder if it’s time that […]
Are We Designing Judgment Out?
I’ve been doing a series of articles about judgment, What It Is, The Costs Of Losing Judgment. This article is likely to hit home to many leaders, managers, Rev-Ops folks. I want to focus on the issue, are we designing judgment out of the work. This isn’t an argument against playbooks, scripts, dashboards, process, or […]
Performance Quotes
““Dave helped us translate our strategic planning process from an annual exercise into the development of a plan the whole organization could get behind and execute. With Dave's support, the team came together and established a clear focus and priorities. The team felt the process was valuable in developing a pragmatic plan, focused on executing those things most critical to achieving the objectives our leadership team had established. Finally, the process established a solid framework for future strategic plans. Dave not only delivered on his commitments but delivered more than was expected.” Vice President Strategy and Planning
“I got a recommendation from a business colleague to reach out to Dave regarding our sales process for our startup. So I did and shot out an email where I asked for some tips on how to better leverage our sales process. Dave responded the same day where he asked if we could hop on a call, and of course, I was a bit amazed at his willingness to go head-on with our current challenges. During our conversations, I told him about a recent deal that had stalled and asked if he had any advice on how to get in a better position moving forward. He gave me some good advice and I also got two action points I could execute immediately. The following day I had a client meeting where I held a presentation and I took one of the action points into that meeting. After the presentation was completed I got the deal, and the client highlighted the expertise we had shown with our offer. Dave’s recommendation was perhaps the one thing I felt was the game changer from what we had done in the past.” Eivind Jonassen, Cofounder and CEO
“As a result of the program on Value Propositions, we have turned around and closed sales of more than $60 million within 45 days of implementing the principles you taught us.” Senior Vice President of Global Sales
“We brought David into our company to help us with our sales and go-to market strategies. His thoughtful and systematic approach exposed areas for improvement which resulted with an improved plan. All our employees benefited, especially when each of our team members shared their knowledge and practical experience across our group. We ended up a stronger, more cohesive and focused team due to David's leadership.” Ray Connelly, Vice President of Supplier Strategy
"Partners In EXCELLENCE differentiate themselves from other consulting firms we've used by providing practical implementable deliverables and then providing support and guidance during execution. Most consultants use a canned, one-size-fits-all methodology…. Because Dave Brock has real world experience in sales, marketing and management, his recommendations are tailored to his client's environment and are readily implemented." Vice President, Marketing
“In the past couple of years David has been a critical mentor, coach and partner to me. Throughout our engagements we together developed the Sales Execution Framework (SEF) which has been foundational for the continuous personal and professional development of my team, especially in the areas sales process mechanics, sales process, sales methodology and our operating system. Hands down this is the main reason why we realized high double digit profitable growth in the past couple of years and are confident we can sustain that in the years to come" Rene Voorhorst, Senior Head Global Account Management
