Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Every once in a while, I have a truly outstanding week. These are weeks where my clients and I take on big challenges and tough issues, trying to figure out what courses of actions should be taken. Last week, I was with several clients, one in luxury real estate, two in high technology. Each is a top performer, not just within their own industries or regions, but they are viewed as top performers by those in other sectors. As an example, I was running a planning workshop with one. Sitting as observers in the workshop were the senior sales executives […]
Read MoreOver the past week, I’ve been involved in several conversations that have the same underlying theme. It’s basically around the concept of Productive Conflict. I believe this is a critical concept–both in how we engage our customers and in driving change internally. At the same time, I believe it is misunderstood, avoided, and executed very poorly with horrible results. As sales people and/or as business leaders, we are responsible for driving change. Whether it is with/for our customers our within our organizations. Change always creates conflicts, though we may not recognize them as such. Why change, change to what, change […]
Read MoreOne of the biggest mistakes sales managers and sales people make is spending too much time focusing on the health of the pipeline. Managers are constantly holding pipeline reviews. They are constantly asking, “What’s changed since we reviewed the pipeline yesterday?” (You can see how tedious these constant reviews are, particularly if you have a long sales cycle (anything over 3 months).) Inevitably, there are problems with the pipeline. There’s the universal managerial answer to these issues, “You need to get more in the pipeline!” “Well yeah, but…….” Turns out the advice to get more into the pipeline isn’t really […]
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