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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
Shifting The Curve
I’m amazed by many of the discussions I read about sales performance management. At some point the “bell curve” is introduced, it’s sliced into “A’s, B’s, and C’s.” Then the discussion focuses on how you shift or bias things to the right (the high performance side) of the bell curve. There are endless debates about what you do, who you coach, how to hire, where you spend your time, how to maximize performance. Taken to an extreme, the focus is “get all A’s, then everything is perfect.” These discussions are good discussions, but the present a relatively static view of […]
Agenda’s
No, today’s post isn’t about some esoteric view of people’s agendas–how we discern them, how we leverage them. This is a rare post for me–it’s about the simple issue of having an Agenda–for meetings that is. I’m amazed at the number of meetings I’m asked to participate in that have no published agenda. Sure everyone knows the topic and general issues, though, 85% of the meeting sales people ask to have with me, they appear to have no structured agenda–at least nothing they have communicated with me. The written agenda is one of the simplest, yet most powerful tools available […]
Are Your Deals Slipping?
One of the biggest problems sales people face is their deals slipping. We forecast a certain close date, then it slips, and slips, and slips, and …….. Things keep coming up, we push the close date out, then more things come up and we get into this seemingly endless cycle until the deal closes. Sometimes these slips in close date can’t be avoided. The customer keeps deferring the decision, we have little control over it. But too often, I think these slips are the result of bad deal strategies — and the sales person is responsible for managing the deal […]
Performance Management Friday — Compliance Is Not The Point Of CRM Systems!
There’s always a lot of discussion in the Sales 2.0, CRM worlds about compliance. Millions are invested in new systems–supposedly. There’s a great urge to make sure people are using them, so compliance has become a key topic of discussion in lots of places. Basically compliance is measuring, “are people using the system?” Compliance — at least the way it’s commonly used is absolutely worthless! Reporting on who has signed into the system, how many times they’ve logged in and all the related measures are meaningless. While some of the vendors would claim it’s important, the goal of CRM is […]
Wanting To Buy Is Insufficient, Does Your Customer NEED To Buy?
Some of you reading the title will say, “Dave’s really gone off the deep end this time, if the customer wants to buy, isn’t that enough?” Maybe in B2C that may be sufficient, but in today’s B2B world, it’s not enough. I’m seeing too many sales people with too many stalled deals. Too many deals clogging up the bottoms of funnels, too many deals that are “almost there,” perpetually. Sales people claim, they’ve done everything possible, but they just can’t get the order. We drill into those deals, “What’s keeping the customer from moving forward?” I may be playing some […]
Selling Process Or Buying Process?
My post yesterday, The Secret To Sales Success, stirred up a twitter discussion about whether there is a Selling Process or if everything is about the Buying Process. Since I have a hard time saying my name in 140 characters, I thought I’d move the discussion to the blog, and hope the folks tweeting could follow the discussion here with comments. Let me step back a little. Years ago, we sales professionals had the arrogance to focus only on the Sales Process. Everything was about the steps and activities we went through to move the customer through our pipelines and […]