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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
The Problem With Efficiency
We design our organizations to be lean mean selling machines. Each step of our sales process is optimized to maximize the results our sales people get. We recognize different skills and capabilities are needed in different stages of the sales process. Prospectors prospect, account managers account manage, product line specialists are expert in their product lines, and on and on…. Each role is precisely defined, we have the metrics to by which we constantly measure performance. We’ve worked closely with marketing, they have their lean mean marketing machine optimized to deliver just the right leads at just the right time. […]
“Just the facts, Ma’am…”
The phrase, “Just the facts, Ma’am, ” is attributed to Detective Sergeant Joe Friday (played by Jack Webb) in the series, Dragnet. (Search YouTube or some of the TV Classics channels for episodes. As a bit of trivia, he actually never said that, but it is very frequently attributed to him). Detective Joe Friday was a hard-nosed investigator, refusing to be swayed by emotion, guesses, opinions. Fortunately, his partner and foil, Officer Bill Gannon (played by Harry Morgan) tended to look at these non-factual issues. Too often, our sales efforts are focused on finding, “Just The Facts.” We search for […]
Do What Works, Don’t Do What Doesn’t!
Recently, I wrote, Predictable Revenue. It’s about sales process, in the article I made a statement which is suddenly making the rounds on social media. I said, “While the concept of the sales process is very simple—do what works, don’t do what doesn’t work, recognize the patterns for success, repeat, repeat, repeat.” The concept, Do What Works, Don’t Do What Doesn’t, really applies to everything we do. Some of you are getting pissed off, thinking “Dave you are stating the obvious, do you take us for idiots?” Well, no, but….. Too often I see organizations committed to doing what doesn’t […]
Optimizing Part Of The Selling Function, Sub-Optimizing The Whole
Recently. I read an article in which the position was put forth, “Inside sales does not have the responsibility for creating pipeline, only the responsibility for selling. They should never pick up the phone and make a prospecting call!” Many of you can imagine what my knee jerk reaction was to this statement. But for a moment, I managed to contain myself. The speaker was clearly smart and had been very successful in selling, perhaps there was something I misunderstood. As I got into the article, the question was posed, “Who is responsible for developing pipeline?” The response was, “Someone […]
Predictable Revenue
No, this post is not about Aaron Ross’ book, at least directly. It’s about the challenge each sales person and leader faces in achieving their sales goals. How do we create “Predictable Revenue?” This issue is at the core of most conversations I have with sales people. They are struggling to make their numbers, they face more competition, it’s more challenging to access customers, things seem to be tougher. These sales people are struggling, trying anything they can to find opportunities, qualify them, move them to closure. Often, it looks like “bumper cars,” at a carnival–events or circumstances push them […]
Understanding Our Customers’ Experiences
We’re doing some renovations in our home. These include changes in the Master Bedroom and Master Bath. As A result, my wife and I have temporarily moved to a guest room and are having to use a guest bath. It’s been interesting–and a little embarrassing — at least thinking of what we’ve put past guests through. There wasn’t anything glaringly bad about the guest bedroom and baths, just a whole series of little annoyances—bad lighting in one room, inconvenient switches and outlets in another, the bed was a little soft in another. In the shower, something was up with the […]