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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
What’s Your Approach To Managing Performance?
As leaders and sales managers, a key aspect of our jobs is to manage performance. I find lots of different approaches people use, but at the core the approaches tend to reflect two completely different views of performance. (Stuart Cross has an interesting perspective, looking at 4 views–we’re actually not far apart, I’d encourage you to watch his short video on this.) I find managers who are problem solving oriented and others who are developmental oriented. The problem solving oriented manager is focused on today’s performance issues and addressing them. They look for shortcomings in current performance—someone not making their […]
Remembering
I’m a little surprised that I’m writing about 9/11. It’s a big departure from my normal ramblings. This morning, I had no intention of writing about it. But I found myself remembering. It’s one of those things many of us speak about–an event we remember for all our lives. There are a handful that I always remember, this is one. The memories are so vivid. On the morning of 9/11/2001, I was at work in my office–the radio was on in the background. I was catching up on things, The night before, I had just returned from a two week […]
Performance Management Friday — Average Transaction Value
Over the past few weeks, I’ve focused on various pipeline/funnel metrics that sales people should consider in assessing their own productivity. In the post, Ideal Pipeline Volume, I talked about Average Transaction Value as a key performance indicator. I want to dive into this more deeply. Just for a quick review, three of the greatest levers in hitting your goals are: Increasing Your Win Rate, Reducing Sales Cycle, and Increasing Average Transaction Value. Of these three, perhaps the easiest to achieve is increasing the average transaction value. Too often we defeat ourselves and our ability to achieve our numbers. Every discount we […]
Steeling Myself For The Aftermath Of DreamForce
It’s not just an Dreamforce occurrence, it happens with every conference I attend. I’m now having to deal with the aftermath of participating in these conferences. It’s kind of ironic, whether it’s DreamForce, the Sale 2.0 Conferences, anything on improving the effectiveness and productivity for sales people and organizations, the discussions and engagement at the conference is always enlightening. As one might expect, much of the talk at DreamForce was around engaging customers in new and innovative ways. There were great discussions and presentations about creating new conversations, about nurturing prospects with timely and meaningful communications, about driving new meaning […]
Will You Let Me Buy, Rather Than Trying To Sell To Me!
Today, I was doing some research on upgrading a product I currently used. I wasn’t sure about what would be included in the new release, consequently, wondering whether I should upgrade or not. I visited the web site, was struggling with the information on the website. While they kept wanting me to buy leveraging buy buttons and pop-ups, I struggled to find the information about the changes in this software. Then the, “Do You Want To Chat” pop-up came up. I decided to go for it. It asked for my name, email address. Having been through this before, I knew […]
Finding The Time
Last week, while at Dreamforce, I had a conversation over coffee with a relatively new sales manager. He was excited about the job and the opportunity to move forward in his sales career. We talked about how he spent his time. It seemed to be a flurry of activity. He wanted to go on sales calls with his people, feeling he could contribute to moving deals forward. As part of the management team, he was called to participate in any number of meetings–budget reviews, planning meetings, forecasts reviews, reviewing reports, creating reports — the list went on. Somehow, the sheer […]