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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
Our Customers Can’t Afford For Us To Wait Until They Are 70% Through Their Buying Cycle!
It’s that time of year again, there are lots of posts around the popular research that indicates, “Customers aren’t engaging sales until they are, 57, 70, 90 (depending on the research you read) through their buying cycle.” As usual with the posts, there are the usual doom and gloom announcements about the future of selling and the “death of the traditional sales person.” Depending on the point of view being promoted and the services or tools being sold by the writer, things are shifting to social, marketing automation, content, inbound inside sales, and any other configuration of whatever is being promoted. I’m […]
Sales People, We Have A PR Problem
Sales people, we have a PR problem, …..it’s Real,…… and we probably deserve it, …. and we need to do something about it. I just read this post by Brian de Haaff, CEO of Aha, This CEO Will Never Hire A Sales Person. My initial reaction was, “This guy is clueless about professional sales.” He spoke about displacing sales with a Customer Success team, people dedicated to making sure customers are successful. People on a profit sharing plan, but with no quota, not prospecting, without commissions, dedicated to the customers’ success. He went on to explain companies like his need to […]
The Product Focused Company
I spend a good amount of time calling on the customers and prospects of my clients. Recently, I was doing some win reviews. We were very interested in learning more about why these customers bought from my client. The key competitor was much larger and the dominant force in the industry. Winning against them was a real coup, we wanted to learn more about how we could repeat that. The competitor, like my client, had a very broad product line. There were significant overlaps between the product lines, both those of the competition and those of my client. So the […]
“I’m Too Busy To Prospect”
I’m constantly amazed at the fear that strikes at the hearts of sales people with the mention of the word, “Prospecting.” While it doesn’t strike fear into my heart, it’s still something a don’t like to do (though there are ways to make it more enjoyable). It’s also interesting to hear all the reasons and excuses sales people dream up to avoid prospecting, “I have a proposal that’s due, I have a meeting on this deal, I’m busy prepping the demo for that deal……. The dog ate my prospecting script.” There’s no end to the creativity to the reasons why […]
Attention To Detail Or Micromanagement?
Recently, I’ve been involved in a number of heated discussions on micromanagement and attention to detail. Often, at a superficial level, they look the same, but in reality they are very different. Attention to detail is critical both to individual contributors and managers. Micromanagement is a waste of everyone’s time–the individual contributor and the manager. So what’s the difference between these? I think attention to detail is primarily about learning and development. Where micromanagement has little to do with either of those things, and is probably rooted in lack of trust or respect. Let’s look more deeply at attention to detail. […]
Should Sales People Be On Quota?
Yesterday, I was being interviewed by Pat Helmer for a podcast (it will be published in a few weeks.) He asked a question, “Should sales people be on quota?” For a fraction of a second, I was stunned. How could anyone even ask the question? Not having a quota was something that was absolutely inconceivable to me. Pat went on to describe that many sales managers he talks to have other goals/metrics they use–certain numbers of activities, other measures. (which when you look at it is really a form of quota). Later in the day, I got an email from […]