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
Think It’s Hard To Sell, It’s Harder To Buy!
One of my biggest weaknesses is my impatience. I do all sorts of things to control it, or at least mask it. I sit on my hands, bite my tongue, count to 1000 then start over again. Sometimes it’s a losing battle with myself. Recently, I was sitting with a group of sales people. It was a pretty large group of all different ages. One person started talking about how difficult it is to sell. Everyone piled on, whining about the difficulties they faced (you can see me betraying my impatience with the choice of words). The complaints were the […]
Trust, Your Commission Plan, Making Money
I’m ashamed to admit it, every once in a while I get sucked into mind numbing discussions on LinkedIn. This one was posed by an individual pretending to want to become a “trusted advisor” to his customers. He posed a scenario, “I can propose A to my customer and this is my commission. If I propose B to my customer, my commission is more. B is a better solution, but I’m afraid my customer will think I’m being deceptive since I’m getting paid more for it….” The conversation devolved, for the most part, from there with people discussing various alternatives, […]
Principle Based Selling!
Are you training and coaching your people “principle based selling?” No I’m not announcing a new sales methodology or trying to infringe on a few companies calling their methods “Principle Based Selling.” We often use the word principle to describe values we hold, for example integrity, honesty, respect for others. Those are important, but not the subject of this post. What I’m referring to when I use the term “principle based selling,” I’m focused on identifying the fundamental things that drive sales success for your organization. Do your people understand those base principles, can they leverage them in situations they […]
“Amping Up” Your Pipeline Reviews
Managers spend an inordinate amount of time in pipeline reviews. Largely, I think this is the result of lack of clarity of what they want to accomplish in pipeline reviews or too great a focus on the numbers and not what produces the numbers. (but these are topics for other articles.) Probably 95% of all pipeline reviews I sit in are wasted efforts. The manager will start reviewing the pipeline, immediately finding a deal that catches her eye, deciding to deep dive into that. Guess what, all of a sudden the pipeline review has become a deal review! The conversation […]
Can Revenue Be Predictable?
I saw an interesting question on LinkedIn, “In SaaS businesses, can revenue still be predictable?” My reaction to this question, not just limited to SaaS, is “Absolutely—-sort of………” Building predictable revenue streams is nothing new to sales. The creation of SaaS companies with a high volume, high velocity model for acquiring customers wasn’t the inception of predictability in revenue generation. For decades, perhaps centuries, organizations have built models to predict revenue, all with varying degrees of accuracy. In some businesses, there are highly predictable revenues based on highly sophisticated trend analysis. These models take into account seasonality, economic conditions, market […]
What’s Going On With Digital Business Transformation?
It seems impossible to escape the articles on Digital Business Transformation. Sales/Marketing Automation Tools suppliers are jumping all over it, because it helps them sell more tools. Pundits focus on how marketing and sales must leverage these tools to engage customers. To some degree, I think much of the discussion is this year’s version of social selling, since that term has fallen into disfavor. More broadly, the articles seem to focus on IT transformations and technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Robotics, IoT, etc. It’s a brave new technology driven world. All of these discussions are important, but I think they […]