Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Are Sales People “Coin Operated?
We are facing a crisis in sales retention. Average tenure for sales people and managers has plummeted to 16.5 months. As I speak to sales executives and managers about the reasons for the increasing voluntary turnover, too often, they respond, “It’s all about compensation! Sales people are coin operated, if they have the opportunity to make more money some place else, they will go after that opportunity.” But the data shows a completely different picture. In a Gartner survey of over 200 sales people, the following shows the top 10 reasons about why sales people leave. Compensation is the leading […]
The “Did I Manifesto”
My friend, Kevin Dorsey, wrote a fantastic piece on LinkedIn. Be sure to read it. Kevin outlines a number of important things, but underlying these in the importance of periodic self reflection. For many, we are beginning a new quarter. It’s always a good time to go through a quick mental checklist about what we have done and not done in, for example, the past quarter. Too often, we are consumed with our day to day activities, we lose site of what we are doing and where we are going. We end up reacting to the things that impact us […]
We Don’t Lose Because Of What We Sell!
Sit down with most sales people doing a loss review. The majority of the reasons cited for losing are: Price Price Product deficiencies Restrictions in how we do business, contracts, etc. Price According to sales people, why we lose has little to do with our own performance. Ask customers why they chose to buy, or even why they couldn’t make a buying decision, the responses are seldom about the product or their confidence in the product/solution. Yeah, I know I will be deluged with emails and comments saying I’m wrong with endless amounts of “evidence” that “If we just had […]
Disciplined Execution, The Secret To Success!
Human beings are always looking for the secrets to success. Somehow, we want to believe there is the “one thing” that drives success. In sales and marketing, we are no different. We constantly look for that silver bullet that drives sales and marketing success. And there is no end to those gurus or vendors that claim to have discovered that “one thing,” that enables you to be successful. It may be a new technology, it may be a new training approach. For some, social selling is that one thing, for others it’s prospecting (in whatever form that takes), for others […]
Prospecting, Going Through The Motions
Today I received a prospecting email, something about it seemed familiar. I did a quick search through my email archive (I save this stuff, it’s such great fodder for blog posts). Sure enough, 90 days ago, I received the exact same email from the same person. And 90 days before that, I received the same email form the same person. And 90 days before that, ……. For each of the prior emails, I had actually responded. My first response thanked the sender for the outreach, but I explained why we wouldn’t be interested (What they sold didn’t fit our business […]
What About The Forecast?
Forecasting is important to our business, we spend a lot of time (often too much) on forecasts. But too often, we get forecasting wrong. Some observations: We strive for forecast accuracy, but we will never be perfectly accurate. Even the dictionary calls it a prediction or an estimate. Yet we waste a lot of time trying to achieve levels of accuracy that are unreasonable. The forecast is a prediction of revenue/orders we expect to get in a period of time. Managers and others in the business are anxious to know where we will be in terms of expected revenue or […]