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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
Performance Management And Accountability
Years ago, a manager used to tell us, “Your increases will become effective when you do.” It was a funny way of reminding us our compensation was linked to our performance. If we didn’t achieve our performance objectives, we couldn’t expect increases in our compensation. We talk about accountability a lot, but we tend to gloss over the consequence sides of accountability. Being accountable for our performance goals not only means we do everything possible to achieve them and that we have internalized and own them. It also means we understand and accept the consequences of not achieving those goals. Every […]
No Way To Prospect
I opened the email: “David, Do you give product reviews? [First Name Withheld]” Hmmm, I thought. An unusual approach, is this SPAM? No introduction, no identification of who is making the request, just a first name. Applied my detective skills to the email (one of those with a first name and no last name). This was really odd. Decided I’d play along, I responded, “It depends.” Nothing else. A few minutes later, “David, So you need a story hook, how about finding a hook from one or our customers…. [Product Name] is an amazing tool for creating business cases” A couple […]
Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures
For the past several weeks, I’ve been focusing on various aspects of the funnel/pipeline. We’ve explored different measures or KPI’s that can be used to monitor personal performance and help sales professionals assess ways to improve performance. Let’s leave the funnel/pipeline for a while, and look at some other things that may be helpful. Activity levels are important. Yeah, I know many of you are groaning in anticipation. Too many of us have been subjected to arbitrary or meaningless activity measures. Whether its the number of daily outbound prospecting calls you have to make, the number of customer meetings every […]
Talking About Price!
There have been a number of interesting blog posts and discussions going on about when it’s appropriate to talk about price. Most sales people tend to want to defer the pricing discussion until very late in the sales process. Some for good reason, some just out of habit–but with no real rationale at all. To tell you the truth, I don’t know how to answer that question. I tend to defer the investment discussion until very late in the sales cycle. Since we sell consulting services, it’s impossible to know the price we will charge until we understand the scope of […]
What If You Sold What Customers Wanted To Buy?
We know what we want to sell. We’ve ben trained, we have all our brochures and presentations. We struggle and pitch. We have the killer solution, the customer seems to like it. We’re very close, but we struggle. The customer just isn’t buying. We seem to be stuck. I see this often. A client was struggling with a big proposal. There seemed to be a huge gap in what the customer was willing to pay for and what was being proposed. The client was struggling, it seemed to close the deal, they’d have to discount very significantly. In reviewing their proposal, […]
The Meeting
You’ve spent all this time trying to get through to the prospect. You’ve finally reached the customer and set up the first meeting. You’re getting yourself ready– you’ve got one shot, you need to maximize your impact. Most sales people would grab a briefcase full of brochures, case studies and testimonials. They would make sure they had the latest PowerPoint presentations on their computers or Ipads, ready to pitch. For some, preparation for the meeting will be done as they sit in the lobby waiting for the customer. For others, they feel they’ve done so many sales calls, they’ll just […]