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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
Cutting Sales Expense
Recently, I got a call. When I filter out all the prospecting calls, usually when people call me, it’s a CEO, VP of Sales/Marketing, or someone in the sales organization. This call was from the Controller of a relatively large organization. He had been chartered by top management to look at their sales organization. It wasn’t meeting it’s goals, so he was doing an audit. He had stumbled across some of my articles, wanting an outside opinion, he called me. Without giving me any background, his first question was, “How do I chop sales expense? What should the right level […]
Sales Manager Enablement
Thanks to people like Mike Kunkle, Tamara Schenk, Jason Jordan, Mike Weinberg, and others; the importance of Front Line Sales Manager Enablement is getting some visibility–though still not enough. As they discuss and I’ve discussed in past posts and Sales Manager Survival Guide, the single biggest lever on front line sales performance is the Front Line Sales Manager. It’s the FLSM that provides the day to day support, coaching, reinforcement, and leadership to maximize the performance of each person on their team. Without their continued reinforcement of training, systems, tools, programs–most of our sales enablement initiatives would be unsustainable. We […]
Teaching Sales People To Lie….
Just when you think you have seen the very worst prospecting email ever, you get one that takes you to new lows! I opened my email today and read: “Hello Dave, It has been some time since we last spoke, let alone worked together. The fault of this is mostly mine. However I want to make up for my time of neglect and reach out to you today to ask you a simple question. Do you want to continue to hear from me?” There is so much wrong in these four sentences, not to mention the several hundred words that […]
You Get What You Measure/Compensate For!
It’s an age old adage, “You get what you measure and compensate for.” If it were true, why do we have such a gap in sales quota performance? We’re measuring it, we’re tracking it, but the majority of sales people aren’t achieving their goals. There are a lot of things that impact quota performance, but I suspect a large part of the challenge are the other things we measure, hold people accountable for, even compensate at some level. To often these are activity metrics which desk bound managers track, beating the crap out of those who don’t achieve them, Too […]
Are We Getting Prospecting Wrong? What Is The Customer’s First Impression?
Today, most of what I hear from sales people and executives is they are opportunity starved. They are all desperate to find more qualified opportunities. Prospecting and lead gen have become the dominant issues in many sales organizations. There are, of course, the ongoing challenges of making sales people understand they must prospect! Clearly, lead gen programs aren’t producing enough and it is irresponsible for sales people not to prospect. But this post is not about getting people to prospect. I want to address the issue of how we are prospecting. We face all sorts of challenges in reaching and […]
Effectiveness Must Precede Efficiency
Too often, we seem to focused on volume, velocity and activity levels, thinking that the more things we do, the better we are. We set goals for number of prospecting calls, numbers of meetings, and any number of things. The thinking is, if we simply do more, we produce more. On face value, that makes sense. Having 20 prospecting conversations a week is twice as good as having 10 prospecting conversations a week (assuming all else is equal). Chris Beall, of Connect and Sell is gracious in publishing data in this area. The data provides really interesting insights and questions […]