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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
Sales Manager: Stop Wasting Your Time On Coaching Meetings!
I get complaints from both sales people and managers on the topic of coaching. Sales people don’t feel they are getting the coaching they need—their managers don’t have time. Managers, don’t feel they are providing the coaching they should—they don’t have time (and they don’t know how to–but that’s another post).Somehow, people have the notion that coaching is something that you do differently, it’s kind of like the performance review, a specific coaching session or meeting is scheduled and the manager has to devote a certain amount of time to the “coaching meeting.” The reality is the meetings are scheduled, […]
As A Sales Manager, What Would Your Top 3 Activities Be?
David Batup raised an interesting question on the Sales Best Practices group in LinkedIn. He posed the question: As a sales manager, what would your top 3 activities be?” I couldn’t limit myself to 3, but my response is below: “Nice question: Strategically: 1. Make certain you have a strong sales process in place, everyone understands why it’s important, and how to use it in managing their own territories and activities. Make sure you have the right tools in place to support the effective execution of the strategies and processes. Make sure your people understand how to use them.2. Clear […]
Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation?
It’s Friday evening, I’m cruising some of the blogs and other forums as I wind up the day. I saw a question posed on the Sales Best Practices board in LinkedIn. The question concerned the Reputation of Sales, asking about why do we see such bad stereotypes of sales people — lazy, unprofessional, etc. It went on to ask why people don’t like sales people. For those of you that are regular readers, you probably know that was all that was needed to set me back on my soapbox. Here’s my response: “I’ve been a proud sales professional for all […]
No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!
Well, I’ve got your attention with the implied profanity! Sorry about that, but we all know what I mean. We’ve all seen it, experienced it, even actively participated in it. We all know what is happening. Think of the endless meetings we have, whether they are internal meetings, with customers, suppliers, and others. Everyone presents a polite face. There is an air of “superficial congeniality,” seeming agreement, then the meeting ends and everyone goes off and does what they intended anyway. It may be a passive aggressiveness, it may be an avoidance to confront and openly discuss the tough issues. […]
Reducing the Learning Curve: Rapid Onboarding Critical to Sales Performance
Guest Post By Jeffrey Stanley, Director of Sales Excellence, AT&T Mobility All sales managers know the problem…we’ve spent months recruiting, interviewing and hiring the right person. The great hire has started, all of a sudden management is complaining: Why aren’t they producing sales? Or even worse, we know that we’ve made a great hire, sent them to training and assigned them a strong territory. However, after 3 or 4 months they get frustrated and leave. Not only do we have to take the time to go through the process all over again, but we have the tremendous expense and more […]
Stop Pitching, Start Listening To Your Customers
Last week, I wrote a post “Stop Assuming Your Know Your Customers, Start Listening To Them! The post stimulated a lot of comments on the different sites it was posted on. Thanks to each of you who took the time to offer your great ideas! In that post, I ranted about the focus sales and marketing professionals seem to have on “Pitching,” arguing we need to stop pitching and start engaging our customers in conversations. I’m back on my soapbox, I read a post from someone I hold in high regard, but he set me off. The post was entitled, […]