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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
Pssst…..Isn’t It All Really About Self Interest?
We seemed embarrassed to admit it, or we are trained not to say this, but selling isn’t selling really about Self Interest? Despite all the things we say about being customer focused, what we really want is for the customer to buy what we are selling. We want to win, we want to beat the competition, we want to achieve our goals, beat our quotas and earn our commissions. We want to be successful. It’s really all about Self Interest…..but what’s wrong with that? Isn’t business, and life, really about Self Interest? We choose our relationships based on how they […]
The Thigh Bone Is Connected To The Shin Bone, The Shin Bone…..
My last post, The Hip Bone Connected To The Thigh Bone….. , started a discussion about systems, that is how things work, interrelate, and the dependencies they have on each other. I focused specifically on how we acquire and retain customers, focusing on sales and marketing as separate, but tightly related systems. Changes we make in components of our marketing systems impact the overall marketing system and impact the corresponding sales systems — and vice versa. For example, if we gear up a major new sales prospecting initiative to acquire new customers in a certain market segment, but we don’t […]
The Hip Bone Is Connected To The Thigh Bone, The Thigh Bone….
No, I’ve not decided to convert this blog into a lesson on Anatomy, I actually want to talk about systems. But I don’t mean systems–technology, I mean systems–the way thing work, how things interrelate, specifically in acquiring and retaining customers. The way we acquire and retain customers is a complex inter-relationship of different activities and processes. These processes occur within our organizations, for example through sales and marketing, with our customers–their buying processes, and in the surrounding community–our competition, opinion leaders, and others. All these “subsystems” are connected together, they depend on each other, respond to each other. Likewise, these […]
Pay For Performance?
I hear the phrase, “Pay For Performance,” all the time. I think it’s a reasonable concept, that is, the better you perform, the better you get paid. Naturally, we want to pay our top performers the best, who can argue with that? Somehow, it seems as though Pay For Performance is getting distorted. If we want the sales person to do something, other than get orders, we put a bonus on it or add it to the commission plan. We want the CRM system updated, put a bonus on it. We want forecast accuracy, let’s pay the sales people for […]
Compensation Drives Sales Behavior? Is Compensation The Only Tool For Managing Sales Performance?
I’m participating in a discussion with a group of people I deeply respect. It is about managing sales performance, particularly about getting sales people to do things they don’t like to do. You know what those are: Spending time doing reports for management, updating the CRM system, attending one more training class they think they don’t need, getting those expense reports in on time, participating on an internal task force…….. The list goes on. The argument of sales people is always the same, “You’re keeping me away from the customer, don’t you want me selling?” “This will keep me making […]
Reacting!
Sales people are great at “reacting.” The customer puts a hurdle in front of us, we know how to respond. The competitor does something, we know what to do. Our management asks us to do something, we immediately (well OK–almost immediately) jump on it. Most sales people are proud of their nimbleness and speed in reacting, handling any challenge put to them. I guess I have the problem with the “re” part of reacting. If we are reacting, it means someone else is acting–demanding our response. It means someone else is setting the rules, defining the playing field, possibly defining […]