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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
The Sales Stack, Another View
My friend, Jim Keenan, wrote an interesting post on “The Sales Stack.” It offers an interesting view and initiates a great conversation on critical elements of developing and implementing a customer focused “Go To Market Strategy.” (Never mind that Jim displays his geekiness by talking about a “Layered OSImodel,” and me displaying mine by recognizing it.) An enterprise “Go To Market Strategy,” is a multilayered approach–each layer combining different elements of strategy and execution, complemented by systems, processes, tools, training, and people. I think the “layering” concept Jim presents is a great model for all of us to think about. […]
What Happens When We “Fix” The Sales Problem?
We have a revenue problem, we aren’t making the numbers, we aren’t growing, we rush to “fix the problem.” The first and most natural place to look (and blame) is sales. After all, sales is at the tip of the spear for generating revenue. Conscientious sales executives may be seeing the revenue trend before anyone else (problem pipelines, deals languishing or disappearing). They look at the performance of their teams, developing and executing strategies to improve results and performance. Typically, somewhere in this process, I get called in–either by the CEO or the top sales executive. The charter usually is, […]
Sales Early Warning System—Are You Leveraging It?
The second half of the year has just begun. Recently, I’ve been getting some panicky calls, “Our pipeline is a disaster! We need to find and close more deals!” What’s shocking to me is the level of “surprise,” being expressed by these very sophisticated business people. I have to admit, it’s a little difficult for me to understand the “surprise.” I wonder, “Why does this seem to be a surprise, do people have the right measurement systems in place?’” The pipeline is the single most powerful tool for individuals and managers, alike, to give insight into whether you are on […]
Sales And The Dreaded “P” Word
No this isn’t a post about pricing. There’s a “P” Word that strikes dread into the hearts of every sales person–it’s purchasing (or procurement). We all dread purchasing. We do everything we can to avoid them or work around them. All they are interested in is hammering us for price. All they want to do is slow us down, involve our competitors. Selling is tough enough as it is, but throw in purchasing and it becomes hopeless. It’s interesting to me, both sales and purchasing are trying to achieve the same thing for their companies, yet we tend to have […]
Lean Sales And Marketing
Over the past several weeks, I have had the good fortune to participate in a number of “Kaizen Blitz’s” with a client. They were focused on identifying great improvements in my client’s go to market and sales strategies. One of the profound things about these workshops was that 70% of the participants came from non-sales or marketing functions—manufacturing, development, operations, quality, legal, human resources, and executive management. The results of these meetings–as we move forward in executing these ideas will drive tremendous improvement in the client’s growth, with great improvements in the performance and productivity of sales and marketing. Let […]
Everything Counts, The Customer Is Always Evaluating Us
Several days ago, I wrote an article, Duz Speling nd Gramer Matr? It provoked a lot of comments (and some justly deserved grammatical checks). Jeb Blount made a great comment at Sales Gravy. I thought I’d expand on it. Customers are always evaluating sales people—they are checking to see it they perform, if their words match their actions, are they people they should to business with, what separates them from all others. Consequently, everything we do counts–there are no mulligans or do overs. Consciously or unconsciously, everything we do either builds the perception customers have of us or diminishes it. […]