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
How Well Do You Know Your Customer?
My friend, Tim Ohai, has a brilliant bet he makes with sales people. He puts a $100 bill on the table, saying, “If you can talk about your customer, their problems, opportunities, and challenges for 20 minutes, without ever mentioning your products, the $100 is yours.” The tragic part of this story, is that Tim has never had to pay the $100! The unfortunate imbalance is, any sales person can talk for hours on end about their products, pausing occasionally to take a breath or a sip of water. They can fill whiteboard after whiteboard with facts, figures, feeds and speeds. […]
Starting The Conversation With A Lie……
I’m sure you experience the same thing I do. Everyday, I get inundated with phone calls and emails. There are some common patterns in the conversation or emails, including: We’ve researched your company carefully and know we can help you…….. Having looked at your company, we feel we can help increase leads/sales/profitability [pick one] by 20% [or some other tantalizing number]…….. We’ve worked with companies like yours and have produced…….. We’re local and want to give you personalized support…… I have to admit to some sadistic pleasure in returning many of those calls and emails, I know what to expect, […]
“Fix The Sales Problem!”
The executive team of a large division of a very large corporation called me to “fix the sales problem.” We were to have a meeting to discuss the issues they faced and to discuss potential corrective actions. I’d asked for data to better understand the sales performance issues. I, also had short phone discussions with a few key sales managers to understand the issues. The conversations were very revealing, some of the issues they described: Year after year, numbers and expectations of the sales organization had increased tremendously. There was little sales input, just a number provided by the executive […]
How Is Your Time Being Spent?
“Time available for selling” is plummeting. Several years ago, we assessed how sales people for a very large client were spending their time. Both they and we were shocked with the results, less than 20% of their time was being spent directly on customer related activities. Let me sharpen that definition a little, primarily so you can see the magnitude of the challenge sales people face. In this survey, we defined “customer related activities” as time spent preparing for a meeting with the customer (phone or face to face), the actual time spent in the meeting, and the time spent […]
The Secret To Sales Success!
Our company works with a lot of organizations ranging from the world’s largest to start-ups. We also coach a lot of individuals. While each engagement is very different, at there core there’s one common theme, they are trying to discover the secret to success. Clients may be looking at how to raise sales performance, how/what products to bring to market, how to grow/expand/improve, how to beat the competition, how to establish market leadership. While many consultants tend to wrap a lot of fancy studies, analysis and stuff around the projects, perhaps to justify outrageous fees. The secret to sales success, […]
The Engaged Leader
I read a fascinating post by Patrick Lencioni, entitled, Micromanagement Is Underrated. It’s a must read post! No one likes working for a micromanager. No leader likes being accused of micromanagement. As a result, there is the phenomenon Lencioni describes as Management Abdication. Where managers, out of fear of being micromanagers, back off, ultimately becoming disengaged. To be honest, I think there are a lot of reasons managers are disengaged, this is just one. There’s a huge amount that can be written about abdication management, but instead, I’d like to focus on the differences in micromanagement and the engaged manager. […]