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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
……Putting In The Time…..
I was in a fascinating discussion with a group of thoughtful sales managers. During the conversation, we were talking a little about the great resignation, quiet quitting, and doing the work. A manager posed a question, “Clearly most sales roles and all managers roles aren’t something where you punch a clock. You can’t expect to do the job in 40 hours a week. It probably takes more, but how much? When do we know we are asking our people to do to much? How do we know when we are just spending too much time on the job.” It is […]
Mine Is Bigger Than Yours!
Get your minds out of the locker room! I’m talking about your Sales Stack! Is it big enough, is it bigger than others in your industry? I suppose it’s not surprising, but there’s a lot of talk about the importance of sales stacks. As you would expect, much of it is driven by the vendors of sales technology tools. Apparently, at least according to them, the secret to sales success is the number of sales technology tools an organization deploys–less the strategies the organizations deploy in engaging customers in meaningful ways. As an example, recently a vendor sent an offer […]
Is There (Sales) Life Outside SaaS?
It seems everything in my feed is dominated by “SaaS Selling.” It may be the algorithm–we do have a heavy technology and software client base. But 50% of our clients are in other sectors. It seems everything I read is about “SaaS selling.” We’ve developed wholly new language, acronyms, and so forth. We’ve created “new” metrics, KPIs that actually aren’t so new. We’ve created formulas for sales success in SaaS. It seems that everything new about selling, everything about sales performance really focuses on SaaS selling. One wonders, “Is that all there is?” Is there selling life outside SaaS. In […]
“This Is What We Do…..”
We all recognize this, “This is what we do….,” or some variation of this appears in the first or second sentence of every prospecting message we get. The rest of the message goes on to explain more of what the sender’s company does. Perhaps they talk more about products/services. Maybe they brag about their premier customer list. Or it’s something about how fantastic their company is. And they end the same way, “Please schedule time on my calendar to learn more about the fantastic things we do and how you can take advantage of them…” And there is the obligatory […]
I Don’t Care How Many Calls You Make Or Emails You Send!
I read an article about the key productivity metrics managers are tracking. According to the survey of over 1000 sales managers, the five most popular metrics were: CRM utilization, Calls made, Emails sent, Conversations, Use of sales tools. I was left scratching my head, thinking, “WTF??????” With the exception of conversations, none of those have been metrics I’ve cared about. I don’t care about CRM utilization. Measuring a sales person’s CRM utilization is absolutely meaningless. This doesn’t mean CRM isn’t important. CRM is a critical tool to help improve seller productivity. But I’m not going to measure it. However, every […]
Who’s Our Ideal Customer?
I’ve taken a break from my series “Things We Thought We Knew About Selling But Really Didn’t.” Restarting it, I want to talk about our Ideal Customers–or our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile.) We toss the term around casually, but when I look at too many pipelines or prospecting programs, the ICP is not discernible. We have a tendency to try to sell to anyone. If someone has visited our website, if they are on a procured mailing list, if they fog a mirror, we try to engage them. If our pipelines are lean, we cast a wider net. We relax […]