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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
Preaching To The Choir
Prepare yourself for a rant, it’s been one of those mornings! As a preface, I’m proud of being a sales professional. I aspire to create value for my customers in every exchange. I strive to learn and improve, despite the years of experience and greying hair. But then I get mornings like this, I’ve been besieged by a half dozen of the most ill-conceived, poorly executed, manipulative prospecting calls one can imagine. They make me ashamed to be a sales person. It started in the middle of the night. My mobile beeped with a text. “Dave, how r u doing? Haven’t […]
Sales Competence, How Do We Know?
Yeah, I know, I know. Many readers will react to this title with responses like, “Isn’t Sales Competence an oxymoron? Isn’t that something like Military Intelligence?” But if we want to maximize sales performance across our organizations, it’s critical that we have a model that identifies critical competencies for the sales organization. Without this, we have no framework for performance management, coaching, development or continuous improvement. In the absence of a sales competence framework or model, often we evaluate and track the wrong things. Too often, we track things like quota performance. But that doesn’t necessarily tell you whether the sales person is […]
Changing Our Vocabularies!
The words we use betray our thinking and focus. How we express ourselves shows our biases, our priorities, our prejudices. So what, what’s this mean to sales professionals? We always talk about sales and selling–it’s natural, it’s what we do, it’s who we hang out with, so we do talk about selling. We do this with our customers all the time, we talk about selling. And perhaps that’s the problem buyers have. All we talk about is selling. It’s incredibly self-centered, it focuses on us and what we do. In some sense, we’ve trained buyers–they ask us what we are […]
Lean Sales And Marketing — High Variability, Low Productivity
Sales people don’t like the routine! We do different things every day. Each situation is different, each call is different. There’s huge variability in our jobs — or so we like to think. But is it really true? Is it really true that we can’t plan our days, that there aren’t some standard practices or processes that we leverage? The job os the sales person is certainly not routine. Each sales situation is different, each customer situation is different–all this is true. But it’s important to understand the difference between the “content” of what we do and the structure of […]
Lean Sales And Marketing — Time Available For Selling
A sales person’s job is to sell–nothing surprising. More and more, however, it seems that things conspire against us, diverting us from engaging our customers. There’s some market research that puts the time available for selling at around 42%, but more and more, that figure seems optimistic. Several years ago, we did a study of a one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. With their B2B sales people, we found time available for selling had slipped just below 20%. More recently, with several large clients, we found time available for selling in the range of 22-34%. Regardless, which […]
Things Are Getting Confusing?!?
We have a rich array of products and solutions to offer our customers. There are multiple channels for our customers to buy our products. We can’t become expert in everything. Everyday I work with organizations and sales people facing very tough issues in working with their customers. Trying to understand the breadth of their products and how they go to market is confusing to them. Organizations are having an increasingly complex array of solutions presented to their customers through a complex array of channels. It’s difficult to keep up with them within our own organizations–but think about it from the […]