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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
It Is ALWAYS About Execution
I’ve been writing a lot about our Sales Execution Framework and a “Back To Basics” approach to sales management and selling. These articles have generated some interesting calls and reactions. A lot of the discussion has been around sales training programs, new approaches, or new tools that companies have implemented–or tried to implement. I had a tough conversation with the EVP of Sales of a mid sized company. He was angry and declared he would never invest in sales training again. He said, “Over the past several years, we’ve invested $100’s of thousands in training our people on new sales […]
Bits And Pieces, September 14, 2019
It’s been a while since I’ve published one of these. The purpose of the “Bits and Pieces series is to point you to outstanding books, events, podcasts, and other resources. I won’t do reviews of the materials, at most a comment. Please trust that if I put it on this list, I think the work is outstanding and worth your time. The UnAmerican Dream, Carlos Hidalgo. This is a stunning book on Carlo’s personal journey to find sanity in his life and to focus on those things that are most important and drive meaning in one’s life. Carlos is a […]
Buying Is About The Customer Achieving Better Outcomes
I was reading a LinkedIn discussion thread, it started with a premise that people love to buy stuff. I’m not sure that’s true, at least in B2B. But Bob Apollo and Scott Santucci started a great sub-discussion. I wanted to expand on this. Too often, because we focus on our jobs and achieving our goals, we lose track on why customers buy, instead focusing on selling. While it seems trite, while we may attempt to sell, it’s useless, possibly counter productive activity, until the customer chooses to start their buying journey. But why do buyers buy? What gets them started […]
Learning From Our Failures
As much as we want to, and should, focus on our sales successes, a large part of sales has to do with failure. We win some, we will always lose some. We try a certain approach, say a prospecting program, or a new sales initiative, or a deal strategy. In the “old days,” we used to do win/loss reviews. They don’t really seem to be part of the vocabulary of most sales managers. Most sales people don’t seem to take the time to reflect on failures to learn from them. It seems the only time we look at our failures, […]
Sales Pipeline, Quantity Or Quality?
You probably think this is a trick question, the answer is obvious, isn’t it? Be careful before you respond too quickly…… Now, I’ve got you worried and wondering, particularly long time readers. Many of you would say, Quality. You would be partly right. “Aha,” you think, “It’s both!” You would be partly right. Now you are probably thoroughly confused. Let me add to the confusion. I look at hundreds of pipelines every year. Based on the majority of those pipelines, one would think the obvious answer is “Quantity!” The mantra of too many managers is, “Fill your pipelines, you need […]
“I Don’t Have Time To Coach/Do Reviews!”
I sit with management teams discussing Sales Execution Discipline and the importance of a regular coaching and review cadence. Inevitably, during the discussion, one manager has the courage to say what everyone else is thinking: “How do I find the time to do this? I’m just so busy, I don’t have the time to sit down with my people to do these reviews and coach them!” I hear the frustration in their voices, they know they should be doing this, most want to do it, but they are so busy, finding the time to do these on a consistent basis […]