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.
There are all sorts of books and articles that talk about the attributes of high performance sales people or high performance teams. There are statistics, data points, research, that identify all sorts of characteristics: Aptitude, comfort in talking about money, ability to handle rejection, listening skills, self discipline, time management capability, industry knowledge, market knowledge, competitiveness, goal orientation….. The lists go on and on and on. All valid, all helpful, but somehow something is missing. It was a conversation with Mitch Little and Hendre Coetzee that created the “Aha” moment for me. Sales success, whether individual or organizational is simply […]
Read MoreIn a conversation with a sales manager, he was struggling with the performance of his people. They were making their numbers–kinda/sortof–it was actually spotty, some months were great, some months were awful, everything evened out over time. The challenge was, a lack of consistency within the team and from month to month. We started talking about activity levels. He said the people always seemed to be busy. I asked, “What are they doing?” He really didn’t know, but had a general impression of “busyness.” Fortunately they had a shared calendar system. I asked him to show me the calendars for […]
Read MoreClearly we live in worlds of increasing complexity. The issues our customers and our own organizations deal with are increasingly complex. The problems and challenges our customers face are not trivial. Our solutions and products are increasing in breadth and scope. The rate of change, both self generated and externally imposed, seems to be accelerating. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get things done! Both with our customers and within our own organizations. CEB data shows the number of decisionmakers involved in making complex B2B decisions has grown from 5.4 to 6.8. And those decisionmakers represent at least 3 functions in […]
Read MoreRecently, I’ve been having a number of discussions on account based strategies, major/global account coverage. To be honest, I’m stunned with some of the thinking about growing account based businesses. Most of the thinking is dominated by retention strategies. Keeping the customer, if you have a subscription type of offering, getting the renewal. Wrapped around this is some notion of upsell/cross sell, “Can we expand the relationship with the current customer (individuals)?” Speaking with one colleague, he observed that too many organizations are focused on just “protecting” the current base, they are afraid of disrupting the relationship with the customer […]
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