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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
Stop Giving Customers Choices!
Henry Ford was rumored to have said, “The customer is welcome to buy a car in any color they want, as long as it’s black.” I think there’s something to that concept. Now before you jump all over me, let me explain myself. The other day, I was meeting with a great sales team. We were discussing some tough deals. One person asked, “How do you handle a customer that asks you for 3 alternative solutions, for example, ‘good, better, best?’” I really try to avoid in my final proposals giving customers alternatives, I believe it’s our responsibility to provide the single […]
Reality (Sometimes) Sucks!
Try as we might, sometimes we just can’t make our goals or commitments. Managers push us for forecasts. They pressure us to hit a certain number. There are mandates about what we have to do. We succumb to the pressure. We tell our managers what they want to hear, not reality. We may talk ourselves into believing what we’ve said. We certainly will try very hard to meet our commitments. But in our hearts we know there’s no way. Looking at the situation pragmatically, even optimistically, we know we can’t possibly make the commitments being requested. But we make them […]
Times Are Changing
Every day I speak with sales leaders and sales professionals who are struggling. They are astute professionals, they are working very hard, but struggling. They may be making their numbers, but just barely. They may be just shy of their numbers. CSO Insight’s 2014 Performance Optimization Survey shows continued performance declines with 58.2% of sales people making quota (down from the previous year at 63%), and 83.9% of organizations making their revenue plan (down from 89.2%). People are working harder. They are leveraging tools to help them. There is no end to new programs and initiatives. But they continue to struggle. […]
We’re All Going To Mess Up
Try as we might to do things right, we’re all going to mess up every once in a while. We may say something that upsets a customer. We’ll miss opportunities with customers. We may miss a commitment. We will lose a deal we shouldn’t have lost. We will miss our numbers. There are any number of things that we will mess up. No one is perfect, we make mistakes. Situations and circumstances change, making what we’ve done wrong. However well we may have planned, prepared, anticipated, something happens and we fail. Sometimes we fear failing so much, that we do […]
Creating Urgency
Trying to close a sale when a customer has no sense of urgency is like pushing a rope uphill. There’s a huge amount of effort, lots of activity, lots of flailing, but very little progress. Let’s face it, if the customer has no sense of urgency to change, we’re wasting both our time and that of the customer. As much as we may want something to happen, it won’t until the customer has a high sense of urgency. So if we see a great opportunity, what are we to do? Are we supposed to walk away until the customer sees […]
What’s Your Special Number?
I spend a lot of time writing about metrics and performance management. It’s critical that we Know Our Numbers. It’s important to analyze performance over time, understanding where we are successful where we need to improve, and identifying new opportunities. Having said that, at times we tend to either drown in data or hide behind constant analysis. Our numbers are important, knowing where we are, looking at how we improve is important. But each of us has that “special number.” It’s not the magic number that tells you everything is in control, but it’s that number that tells you you’re […]