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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
I Have A Problem With “Storytelling”
Storytelling seems to have come into fashion over the past few years. Too often, we have tried to overwhelm our customers with logic, data, and facts; expecting everyone to respond as Dr. Spock did in the old Star Trek series. While we have known we need to make an emotional connection, too often, we still focus on, “just the facts.” Ever since I’ve been in sales, which has been a few years, I’ve known the maxim,”People decide with their hearts, they rationalize their decision in their minds.” Yet we continue to dump data, facts, logic in our conversations with them, […]
The Fastest Way To Fix Sales Performance
Hundreds of pundits, thousands of articles, hundreds of books, hundreds/thousands of sales/marketing automation suppliers purport to have their miracle cures to fixing sales performance. Somehow the miracle cures seem to be: “Just train your people to do these 3 things….” “Do this one thing…..” “Implement this new technology….” “You just need to prospect….” …..and on and on and on….. Don’t get me wrong, many of these things are important and can contribute in big ways to improving sales performance. My own company, helps our clients in many of these areas, whether it’s new processes, methodologies, restructuring, better articulating value. Any […]
Sales Coaching, One Size Never Fits All!
Too often, our sales coaching, if we do it, really misses the mark. We tend to look at things the same way, coaching our people the same way–when what they really need may be very different. Let me use an example. It is actually based on a real customer situation, but provides a great illustration of how our coaching can go off target. Let’s imagine we are looking at improving the performance of two of our sales people. As we look at their pipelines, we find similarities. Each has a quota of $5M. Their pipelines are each about $10M, and […]
“I Don’t Do Templates!”
Recently, I met with a group of great sales executives. They were looking to raise the bar on performance, driving growth. We talked about a number of things, I was trying to understand what they had in place, the challenges they had, and their execution discipline. They had invested a huge amount in very powerful training and tools for the sales people. If people were using the training and tools, their performance should have been much better. As we discussed the situation and looked at the data, it turned out people weren’t using the training or tools that had been […]
Please Hire My Solution
Think of the last time you were looking for a job, or being interviewed for a position you really wanted. What did you do to present yourself most positively and get selected over those competing for the role? You probably: Did your homework, researching the company and the people you would be speaking to. Talked to other people in the company or who had worked for the company to get insight about the company, expectations, how they worked, what their challenges are. You’ve taken time to understand the job description, matching your capabilities to their needs, requirements, priorities. Prepared for […]
Sales Performance Improvement, Where To Start
I wrote, “Improving Sales Performance Without Changing How You Sell.” Readers started responding, “This is great, where do we start?” Here are some thoughts: “One size fits all:” Too often, we have a “one size fits all” approach to performance improvement. We focus on one thing, for example prospecting or pipeline coverage, and inflict this on the entire organization. Yet each person is different, as a result we may be doing the wrong thing with some, or may not be as impactful as we might be. For example, we may have high performers who have a great prospecting cadence and […]