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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
Leveraging Pipeline Metrics
I’m surprising myself, I never thought I’d have to write an article about pipeline metrics. After all, the pipeline has been fundamental to professional selling since the very first sales transaction. Sure, everyone will give lip service about the importance of the pipeline, but, I always ask, “Show my your pipeline and how you use it as a tool in managing your own performance.” Inevitably, there is a lot of hand waving and excuses. Often I hear, “Dave, can you give me a couple of weeks…..” This isn’t just limited to sales people, surprisingly, managers are often clueless, as well. […]
Challenging Our Customers’ Status Quo
We all know to acquire a new customer, we need to incite them to change, to get them to think differently about their business. Without this, they have no need to buy whatever it is we sell. Most of the time, sadly, sales people are in react mode. The customer has already decided to change, they’ve scoped their problem, determined their needs, and are on a path to solve the problem. And at some point in their buying process, we try to get them to go on the journey with us. Sometimes, we get into an account early, we actually […]
Our ABM “Hunting License”
I’ve never been comfortable about the hunter/farmer notions around selling. I’ve always maintained every sales person is a hunter. If you aren’t, you don’t belong in sales. We tend to think of farmers as the account managers, those who think their job is to “protect and defend,” (apologies to many of our police forces). They are driven not to rock the boat, to make sure our customers are happy, to answer their questions, to make sure that we retained them, getting that coveted annual renewal. If we could, we would expand, we’d grow our users, we’d upsell, adding more products, […]
High Performers Spend Their Time Differently
Before reading this post, think about the following quote from Abraham Lincoln: If I have 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first 4 hours sharpening the axe. I’ve had the great privilege of coaching/advising one of the highest performance sales teams I’ve ever worked with. They are led by a great manager who has built a talented team. One of the great things about working with a team like this is they execute in a very disciplined way. This team has been using our Sales Execution Framework (SEF) as the cornerstone to their sales execution strategy. […]
“When Do You Need A Response?”
We live in a FOMO, interrupt driven world. We are distracted by the Adrenalin rush of being busy, forgetting that we aren’t accomplishing the things we had intended to accomplish. One of the most devastating things to our goal attainment is our mistaken view of what it means to be “customer responsive.” Recently, I was watching a sales team work. They were constantly busy, but at the end of each day, as we reviewed their progress against their goals, the progress didn’t align with the activity. As we discussed what happened, these comments started showing a pattern: “A customer called […]
Sales Leadership Is About Human Leadership!
There are thousands of books and articles about selling and how to be a great sales leader–either individually as a sales person or organizationally. Most of these focus on what we should be doing–we need to be customer focused, we need to prospect , we need to have full pipelines, we need to…. We spend, as a profession, billions in training, tools, programs, to help us improve as sales leaders. We say selling is a people business, yet we focus on the mechanization of our interactions. We miss, sales leadership is really about human leadership. Whether we are serving our […]