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
Managers, Your People Are Your Customers!
Some of you may be reading this title, having the reaction, “They work for me, they are responsible for producing the results I expect!” It’s pretty much the “command and control” point of view too many managers still embrace. Too much data points to this being entirely ineffective in leading and developing our people. Plummeting employee engagement data (not just limited to sales), increasing voluntary attrition, terrible employee sat scores (too many organization are afraid to even measure this), and declining revenue/quota performance. We need to treat our people just like we treat our customers……. The thought just struck me, […]
Guiding Our Customers On The Wrong Buying Journey
I have to start this post with a story. I’m an obsessed reader. At least once a week, I have to sign into Amazon to feed my reading habit. On logging in, I’m immediately fed suggestions of books I should buy. Always, they’re in similar categories: The latest in sale/marketing/leadership, biographies, history. Yes, there are also the mystery/spy novels (Daniel Silva, Lee Childs, Vince Flynn, John LeCarre, and so forth). This selection of recommended books makes sense. 70% of the time, the books I buy are in one of those categories. But every once in a while, go to Amazon, […]
When The Manager Is The Problem Performer
Every organization has challenges with problem performers. However, too few address these performance issues–at least until the impact of the problem performance is devastating to the organization. A problem sales person can, easily, have an adverse impact of over a million dollars. The “cost” is not just the lost opportunity in their own territories, but the drag they create on their peers and managers has an impact, as well. Problem performers drag down morale and performance of their peers. Problem performers take a lot of management time–unless managers aren’t paying attention, in which case the manager is a problem performer, […]
An Alternative To High Pressure Selling!
We’ve all been subjected to high pressure selling tactics. We see various forms of these high pressure or manipulative tactics, whether it’s the high pressure sales person focused on pitching products, the sales person that keeps moving the focus back to them and what they want to achieve, incentives to “buy now,” whether they are offered in forms of scarcity or a disappearing discount, and the list of tactics can go on and on. As customers, we resent those techniques used on us. Our customers resent it when they perceive pressure from sales people trying to convince them to buy. […]
The Flip Side Of AI/Machine Learning
Everyone in sales and marketing is jumping on the AI/Machine Learning bandwagon. Mistakenly, too many think of these technologies as the silver bullet that will enable us magically to increase engagement, increase our ability to connect with customers, and fill the ever widening gaps in quota and revenue attainment. Everyday, I see dozens, if not more articles on the power of AI/Machine Learning in sales and marketing. What is ironic, even comical, is most of the thinking is only about sales and marketing. I get the feeling these tools are the secret discovery of sales and marketing, that give us […]
The Future Of Sales
I have been invited to participate in a discussion on the “Future of Sales,” with a small group of wickedly smart practitioners. I can’t express how much I’m looking forward to the discussion and learning. In many cases, predicting the future can sometimes be done with an artful projection of the past. Not with sales/marketing–at least not in these transformative times. For my part, I see a number of critical issues at the organizational and individual level. At the individual level, I see a huge shift in required competencies. The traditional skills/competencies we look for in sales professionals will be […]