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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
Drive Sales With Product Knowledge, Drive More With Customer Problem Knowledge!
I read an article entitled, “Drive Sales With Product Knowledge.” It was a good article, actually covering a lot a great issues, but focused on the importance of having strong product/solution knowledge. We know sales people have to be knowledgeable about our products and solutions, so I don’t disagree with the author’s premise. It’s just that product knowledge is just table stakes, it is insufficient both in being competitive and in maximizing our value to customers. Stated bluntly, customers don’t care about our products. Customers care about what they care about–it’s their own companies, jobs, opportunities, performance, and problems they face. […]
On Thrashing
Thrashing, at least in the manner I’d like to discuss, is actually a very technical term used by computer scientists and IT people. From Wikipedia: “In computer science, thrashing occurs when a computer’s virtual memory subsystem is in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk, to the exclusion of most application-level processing. This causes the performance of the computer to degrade or collapse greatly. The situation may continue indefinitely until the underlying cause is addressed. The term is also used for various similar phenomena, particularly movement between other levels of the memory hierarchy, […]
Win Fast, Lose Faster!
Inevitably, as I do pipeline and deal reviews, I see sales people hanging onto too many bad deals. The deals are hopeless, the sales person may reluctantly admit it, but stubbornly wants to keep it in their active pipeline. These deals arise for all sorts of reasons, some good, but most bad. There are those deals way outside the sweet spot. Perhaps someone responded to a call or email, thinking there might be a fit or a need. But they are the wrong customer, customers where we have had very little success in the past (that’s why they aren’t in […]
High Performing Organizations Outperform Low Performing Organizations!
Over the past 5 years, we’ve been trying to understand sales performance. As part of this, we’ve conducted a comprehensive study of several hundred organizations, including 0ver 30,000 sales managers/executives. The results of this study are stunning–though they reaffirm beliefs we held. What surprised us was the magnitude of the performance differences. Normalizing the data for organization size, region, industry, solution set, we discovered something astounding: 100% of high performing organizations perform better than 100% of low performing organizations! (The standard deviation was very small). Intuitively, we have always believed this, but having the data analysis reinforcing this is simply […]
Is Sales Coaching Dead?
I recently read a post, “Is Sales Coaching Dead?” It was written by a team I respect, and was based on extensive research. The results are interesting–and can lead to confusion in the interpretation. In assessing, 17 critical sales management competencies, the survey ranked Sales Coaching as the most critical competency–5.8/7.0, the bottom ranked was Business Acumen at 4.3. Now here’s where it gets confusing. The study went on to assess the effectiveness in training those 17 competencies with actual sales achievement. The results, at least taken on face value, suggest completely different competencies drive business results. Business Acumen was […]
Sales Leadership Dysfunction —“Super Hero” Sales Managers
My last pose in this series was Disconnected Sales Execs. This week, I continue focusing on the “Super Hero” Sales Managers. We know who these types of sales managers are: They’re the people who swoop in on deals, taking them away from the sales person, closing the deals themselves. Of the differing types of Dysfunctional Sales Managers, this is probably the worst, for a number of reasons. They don’t understand their jobs. They think it’s about closing deals–that’s the job of sales people, not sales managers. Yes, they were probably great as individual contributors. Their abilities to close deals may […]