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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
Does Sales 2.0 Make You A Better Sales Person?
The short answer is Yes–and–No. I sit through all sorts of conferences that promote great technologies and the great capabilities of the Sales 2.0 tools. If you believed the claims, or even discounted them by 50%, virtually every sales person should meet or exceed their quotas if they had access to Sales 2.0 technologies and tools. They seem to be the answer to sales manager’s prayers for quota attainment. Sales 2.0 tools offer tremendous capabilities to sales people. They enable us to dramatically leverage our time–making us much more efficient. Some of the tools (primarily the Business Analytics tools), enable […]
Being Present
The other day, someone called me. He wanted to pick my brain (feeble pickings) for some ideas and ask for some help. I was delighted with the call, both because he’s a prospect, and it was ego gratifying to be asked for the advice. But the call ended up being a waste of time–mine and the prospect’s. See, the problem was the multitasking being done by the prospect. He was in a car–fortunately not driving, other people were in the car, having a different conversation, which my prospect would interrupt our conversation, to inject a comment into the other conversation. There […]
Starting And Stopping
It’s always difficult to balance our selling activities. We’ve got a bunch of hot deals going, we drop everything else, focusing on those deals. There’s the new product launch, we spend all out time visiting customer on the new product. There’s the problem customer, we jump in trying to solve the problem and make them happy. The life of any sales person is one of constant juggling, re-prioritization. We have lots of things going, lots of things diverting our attention, we have to continue to shift where we spend our time. The thing that usually suffers during these times is […]
Shoemaker’s Children??
The phone rings. I pick it up, it’s a sales person from a supplier of Sales Intelligence solutions. “Hi Dave, I’d noticed you were on our site, I’d like to talk to you about how your company can use Sales Intelligence to improve your impact,” he says. “We’ve found the more knowledgeable you are about the people you call, the better the result.” I respond, confused, “I’m not sure why you are calling, I know your solution, I’ve used your solution, I am a past customer.” “Oh,” responds the sales person, “I didn’t know.” Hmmm……….. There are the twice a […]
Performance Management Friday — % Leads Converted To Opportunities
In past posts, I’ve talked a lot about metrics within the traditional Sales Pipeline/Funnel, focusing on qualified opportunities. Today, too many of the sales people I speak to are “opportunity starved.” They don’t have a sufficient volume of opportunities to achieve their goal. One of the most important things sales people must do is focus on prospecting—finding and qualifying new opportunities. One of the most important prospecting metrics is the % of Leads Converted To Opportunities— (Leads Qualified And Converted To Opportunities)/(Total Leads Prospected). For many people this is a frightening number–I’ve seen some people needing to prospect up to […]
Who Is The Beneficiary Of Sales And Marketing Automation?
I had the privilege of participating in a fantastic roundtable at Focus.com today. It was “A Sales View Of Marketing Automation,” with three of the smartest sales and marketing people I know: Alex Shootman, Chief Revenue Officer of Eloqua, Thor Johnson of Team Thor Marketing, and Carlos Hidalgo of The Annuitas Group. It was a great discussion, be sure to listen to the recorded version. But it got me to thinking, there are endless discussion about sales and marketing technologies. There are constant debates on what do we get out of it. We want to make sure that sales and […]