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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
Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places
Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas. They are driven for improvement and innovation. But too often, our efforts are stymied. It’s hard to improve or innovate. Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places. When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?” Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!” Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.” When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel: “Ideas […]
Putting A “Face” To Our Customers
As sales people, we work with customers every day. We see them, we’re in their offices, we talk to them. They’re very real (sometimes too real) to us. Customers–each of them—are very important to us. Sometimes, it’s frustrating, people in our companies don’t seem to be as customer focused as we are. Many of the people we work with aren’t as sensitive to customers as we are. Part of it is they are busy doing their jobs, part of it may be they may not understand how what they do impacts the customer experience, part of it is simply that […]
Performance Management Friday — Quota
I’ve been writing this series of posts on metrics, and how sales people and managers leverage metrics to help maximize our performance for a number of months. I’ve never written about Quota measurements–the “grand-daddy” of all sales measurements. Part of the reason is that it’s something that’s pretty well understood (or so I thought), the other is that it’s a trailing or historic metric. It’s difficult to use on a day to day or week to week basis to monitor and improve our performance. I thought I’d write about Quota for a couple reasons. As we approach the Fiscal Year […]
Buying Has Nothing To Do With The Product We Sell!
We constantly get it wrong, as sales people we focus on our products and what we are selling. As “sophisticated” sales people, we wrap some nice language around it and focus on the solution we sell, hiding the fact that we are focused on selling a product. The real problem is we are focused on selling. Our customers should be focused on buying, but they really aren’t, they’re focused on solving problems or addressing opportunities. Most of our customers’ difficulty in solving problems or addressing opportunities has nothing to do with the solution. But, again, that’s what we focus on. […]
Losing
I’m writing this with some trepidation, I worry that my message will be misunderstood or used by poor sales people as an excuse. With that as a disclaimer, there’s real value in losing—but we have to take the time and extract the value that losing provides us. We never want to enter any sales situation to lose it. We have to compete vigorously, doing everything we possibly can to win! It’s our job, it’s what makes us successful, and it’s what professional sales people live for. However, recently, I was engaged in a conversation with someone claiming his organization’s win […]
What Do We Talk To Them About?
What do we talk to our customers and prospects about? To me, the answer is obvious–yet based on the calls and emails I get from sales people, somehow it must not be that obvious. Everyday, I must get at least a dozen emails or calls from sales people wanting to talk to me—typically the subject they want to talk about is there products. Most of the attempts to start a conversation are just clumsy, “I’d like to talk to you about what we sell.” Some are more artfully worded–“I’d like to discuss how leveraging [Insert some capability] can help your […]