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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
“How Can I Help You — But First Let Me Tell You About Me”
My friend, Ardath Albee, and I were commiserating the other day. We see so many misguided approaches, whether they are sales people, marketers, individuals. They know the theory–yes, they’re supposed to be customer focused. They know they are supposed to talk about customer needs, problems, goals. They know they should focus on solving customer problems by proposing great solutions. But, to often it’s not like that. Just after the words, “how can I help you,” or “what are your needs,” leave their mouths — before we have a chance to respond — they go on and say, “but let me tell you about our products,” or “let me […]
The Sales Forecast, An “Informed Guess”
Several days ago, I wrote a post, The Most Used — Useless Metric In Sales. It’s generated quite a bit of discussion in the various sites where it appeared. In the post, I attacked the weighted probabiliy — based on progress through the sales cycle (you know –Qualified is something like 25%, Discovery, 50%, Proposal 75%, and Closing 100%). A series of discussions on sales forecasting started, so I thought I would toss more wood on the fire. Accurate sales forecasts are critical—not just for sales, but for the entire organizattion. Resources, funds, schedules, expectations are set, based on the […]
Leaping To Solutions! Are We Solving The Right Problem?
Sales people are trained to be problem solvers — we ask questions, probe — once we find a problem we attack like a pit bull and don’t let go until we’ve wrestled the problem to the ground and gotten the order. So what’s the problem with that? Too often we leap to solutions before we understand what the “real problem” is. It’s a real problem, I wrote about it in a post almost a year ago: “The Evolving Role Of The Sales Person–The Sales Person As Diagnostician” It addresses the issue of sales people leaping to solutions and not solving the right […]
Always Be Recruiting!
Dave Kurlan wrote an outstanding post: Bench Strength – The Key To Replacing Salespeople. He mentioned that managers must always be recruiting. It’s such a simple concept, but I am constantly amazed at how few managers–at all levels do this. Here’s how the cycle goes. We have a bad performer in place, we worry about firing the person, because it leaves an open territory….too often we think coverage is more important than quality. Maybe the manager might start looking casually for someone, but the normal day to day events slow the process down, consequently nothing is done for too long. […]
80% of Customer Satisfaction Is Meeting Your Commitments — The Little One’s.
I’m sitting in my office–it’s 97 degrees in the office, I’m fuming, it’s been one of those weeks. I was traveling all week, thinking I was fortunate enough to miss the very hot weather we are having in Southern California (OK, some of you may think I am whining). On Friday, I called my wife, both air conditioning systems in the house had failed — we had just replaced them last October with completely new systems. I told her to call the air conditioner company to get out to the house. That evening, I called her again, “had they fixed the […]
The Most Used – Useless Metric In Sales!
For years I’ve been amazed by the number of very smart sales people and leaders who have a blind spot in forecasting. One of the top issues CEO’s, CFO’s, and even Chief Sales Officers have is forecast accuracy. One of the most used forecasting methodologies based on a “weighted revenue” approach. This approach takes the sum of all opportunities in the pipeline, multiplying the revenue for each opportunity by a probability factor. This makes sense statistically, it’s called expected revenue. For example, if you have a $100,000 sale and a 70% probability, the expected value of the sale is $70K — […]