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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
Attention To Detail….
Perhaps one of the most important capabilities/skills for sales people and managers is “attention do detail.” But I seldom see anyone writing about it–so I will try to change it in this article. Great selling, great leadership are always characterized by attention to detail. Whether it’s probing to determine root causes underlying customer “pain.” Or exploring alternatives with our customers, helping them customers think differently. Or getting underneath the data in our dashboards and understanding “why.” Attention to detail is critical to driving the highest levels of performance in everything we do. Our sales enablement programs look at “Discovery.” We […]
Figuring Things Out!
Sadly, the trend in developing sales people skills is toward a higher level of prescription. We provide email sequences, we script conversations and talking points. We try to formularize all the activities our sales people do with customers. But the world is complex, what our customers face is complex, what our people face is complex. Things change constantly, each customer situation is unique–to them, at a moment in time. We can’t possibly think of everything out people will face, scripting how they handle these situations. Yet, we continue to spoon feed them everything we think they need. And the results […]
Good Revenue And Bad Revenue—Start-Up Version
I know it’s heresy, but not all revenue is good revenue—particularly for start-ups. In fact chasing and winning the wrong deals can be devastating to the long term success of a start-up. But let me backtrack a little bit, I’ve written about this concept quite a bit beore, if you want to read some of the articles, follow the LINK. But let me give a brief recap: Good revenue is: Business we can deliver profitably. Business where we can delight the customer, enabling us to scale within their organization. Business where delighted customers will talk about us and help us […]
Give Your People The Chance To Do Their Jobs!
It’s funny, every once in a while I find myself in similar conversations with different executives. Each starts in a different place, but the underlying issues are all the same. A core issue has come up. It’s actually one that concerns me deeply. “Do we have enough confidence and trust in our people to let them do their jobs?” Let me unpack this just a little. To be able to answer that question with a resounding, “Absolutely, without a doubt,” we have to be clear about a number of things. First, do we have the right people in the job? […]
Ban “Corporate Glamour Charts!”
I was reviewing a presentation a client was preparing for a critical customer meeting. It looked exactly like the thousands of presentations I’ve seen. After the title and agenda chart, came a whole series of “corporate glamour charts.” You know what these are–we’ve all inflicted them on our customers/prospects, and had them inflicted on us. These are the bragging charts. They are the charts where we want to tell the customer how great we are. They always follow the same format. Usually some data about how big we are, how many people we have, our global locations, and all the […]
“Heroic Sales Efforts”
We all have them, the “Must Win Deals,” where we pull out all the stops. We do everything we need to do to win the deal. Often, we are at our most creative moments when we do these deals. We thoughtfully overcome every hurdle, we get the customer to think differently, we mobilize all the internal resources necessary to close the deal. We manage to present a powerful business case, to defend our value, to minimize discounting. Then there’s that adrenaline rush when we win! We pat each other on the backs, we celebrate! We are, justifiably, proud to have […]