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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
Can You “Connect The Dots” With Your Customer?
Every function, every job in an organization is somehow connected with their organization’s strategies, goals, and objectives. Every organization has goals—revenue, earnings, growth, market penetration, geographic penetration, product/offering growth, how they are perceived by customers, how they are perceived in their communities, expansion, competitive positioning, and on and on. The top executives and boards establish these goals and objectives. In turn they translate to goals for each functional organization, engineering/product development has goals/objectives that contribute to the corporate goals. Manufacturing, service delivery, customer support, finance, operations, marketing, sales each have goals that contribute to those of the organization. Yes, even […]
What If Buyers Were Better Buyers?
Buyers struggle doing their “jobs” ……buying! We poor sellers struggle, if it weren’t for these inept buyers, selling would be so much easier. Just reflect for a moment. We know 60% of committed buying processes end in no decision made. For those that make a decision, we know there is a high level of decision regret, particularly with those who have rep-free buying experiences (Thanks to Hank Barnes’ research). And we know the buying process is complicated, going through starts/stops, wandering, shifts in priorities/directions. Just remember the old Gartner “spaghetti chart.” We spend billions in teaching sellers how to sell, […]
Onboarding New Managers
We spend lots of time and money focusing on onboarding new sellers. We provide training, tools, content to reduce their ramp time. Managers spend time helping them become productive. Ironically, we provide very little in the way of onboarding new managers, particularly new front line sales managers. Typically, the process is: “Lisa, congrats on moving into the front line sales manager role…… I need an updated forecast by Tuesday!” Managers are thrown into the role with little training and, too often, little understanding of their new role. As a result, it shouldn’t be a surprise they fall back to what […]
What’s This BS About Helping Our Customers?!?!
We read all the time that we are supposed to be helpful to our customers. We have to help them understand the need to change, perhaps inciting them to change. We have to help them through their buying process. We have to help them understand new opportunities, the challenges/risks of change, how to reach consensus……. According to all the experts, we have to do all of this stuff to help our customers succeed. But, what about us–the sellers? We have our goals and quotas to make. It’s coming onto the Holiday Season, we need those commission checks! Shouldn’t we be […]
You Can’t Opt Out Of Accountability!
In every job and role, we are held accountable. It may be for certain goals. It may be in the ways we conduct ourselves, working with our peers, customers, and others. It may be how we do our work and with who we do it. Accountability applies to everyone–our customers have things, for which they are accountable. Each person in our own organization has things for which they are accountable. Accountability isn’t optional. We don’t choose those things for which we are accountable, it comes with the job we’ve chosen to do. We sign up for these accountabilities when we […]
Coaching In The Middle….
Every few years, we revisit the concept of, “Who do we coach?” I’m starting to see a series of articles re-arguing that managers get the greatest return on their coaching time by “coaching in the middle.” The argument being, when we look at sales performance, we tend to see a normal distribution, or the classic bell curve. We have a small number of very high performers, hopefully, a very small number of low performers, and the bulk of our people are somewhere in the middle. When you start running math models, you start looking at things like: “If we have […]