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
What’s The Customer’s “Whole Problem”
Our focus, naturally, is on what we sell. More accurately, it’s on what problems our products and solutions solve. For the moment, I’ll ignore that most sales people don’t do well at this most basic areas of working with customers. One of the biggest challenges to our success in selling, is that we seldom solve the customer’s “whole problem.” It’s their problem they care about, not just the component we address. The simplest example is if our customer is building a product–let’s imagine a new smartphone. We may provide all the internal electronics, but that’s only a small part of […]
Can Sales Really Create Value?
Leanne Hoagland-Smith wrote an outstanding post, The Ultimate Sales Goal Is Connecting With Customer Value Drivers, Not Creating Value! In the post, Leanne hits head on what too many sales people miss about value. We tend to think of value and value proposition in our terms. Instead, it’s the customer that defines value! For us to be effective in engaging the customer it’s critical to understand their value drivers, positioning our value in the context of what’s important to them. As a result, when we look at most complex B2B buying decisions, multiple people are involved. It’s incumbent on us […]
Tilting The Revenue Curve
In the past few days, there have been a couple of outstanding articles on “Tilting The Revenue Curve.” Bob Apollo wrote an outstanding article. It was based on Jason Lemkin’s article. I was captivated by one line in Jason’s article about new sales managers in early stage SaaS companies. He states the job of the sales manager is to increase revenue growth, within one sales cycle or less. Honestly, I struggled with that idea for a few moments. Jason positions this in a very special use case: The first sales manager a new SaaS company puts in place. I thought […]
Who Are You? Why Should I Trust Buying From You?
Somehow you’ve attracted me to your site. You have an intriguing product. You have a solution I might be interested in. I want to learn more. But before I can go on, you put hurdles in my way. I can’t get beyond your splash page without giving you my contact information. Or I may be interested in subscribing, about to give you my credit card information and I stop. Who are you? Are you real? Are the people behind your company? Why should I trust you with this information? Is your offering real or am I just part of some […]
Are Too Many Sales People Achieving Quota?
I recently read this in an article from a sales compensation expert, “In high performing sales organizations 50-70% of sales people achieve quota. If your team is significantly above this, it’s possible your quotas are too easy. If more than 50% of your organization cannot achieve quota, you may have a quota setting issue or a larger problem with coverage or sales strategy.” I’m not a sales compensation expert. How could I be, once I was told by a manager, “Your pay increase will become effective when you are….” I’m still trying to figure that one out 😉 But I’m […]
Bits and Pieces — July 30, 2016
It’s been a while since I’ve published this random collection of thoughts. Here are a few things that I think are worth checking out: Continuous Learning: In the last Bits and Pieces, I mentioned I was taking the Coursera course on Model Thinking. I’ve gone on to enroll in Design Thinking For Innovation. Developing models and frameworks is critical for all sales and business professionals. As the complexity of our work, our organizations, and our customers skyrockets, we need models and frameworks to help us understand things, to help us evaluate how to most effectively achieve our goals, to help […]