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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
Leadership, Vulnerability, And Being Human
For some reason, articles on “Leaders must show vulnerability,” have been flooding my in-box recently. I get it, leaders must show vulnerability, but what does that mean? As I think of these articles and dozens of others on other leadership qualities, I wonder if we make this far more complicated than it need be. The authors of these articles are just describing behaviors they see in leaders, attaching multisyllabic words to them (because that’s what writers and consultants do.). But at it’s core, one of the characteristics of great leaders is that they are human. Somehow, leaders and followers seem […]
Running To The Edge Of A Cliff At 200MPH!
Recently, I was talking to a group about prospecting. I wanted to create a way they could visualize the importance of ALWAYS prospecting. They had reasonably good pipelines, most were consumed on working those deals. As you might guess, most were doing everything they could to avoid prospecting. They were using their pipelines and the work they were doing to close those deals as excuses not to prospect. Their sales cycle was roughly 6 months away. Somehow, they kept rationalizing, “I’m busy now, I’ll worry about filling my pipeline in a few months. I presented all sort of data around, […]
Forecast Accuracy, Peeling The Onion
We are barely a week into the New Year, but yesterday I found myself in a conversation with an executive team about the forecast. They were looking at the January forecast and starting to think about the quarterly forecast. Sales executives are obsessed with forecasting and forecast accuracy. In my past lives, as a sales executive, I don’t know how many hours I spent looking at the forecast. I’d play endless games with my sales ops VP, controller, and the RVPs. We’d have spread sheets and other reports, looking at different puts and takes on the forecast, trying to figure […]
Sales Enablement And Talent Management
Talent, that is attracting, growing/developing, retaining great talent is critical to sustained sales performance. Surprisingly, talent management doesn’t get the necessary attention from sales management and sales enablement. Hold on, before you start hissing and throwing things at me…… Let me explain. Talent management must be a top priority for Sales Leaders/Management. I’ve been on a rampage about this in a number of recent posts. Sales enablement can do a lot to help sales management with Talent Management. It’s doing a lot already, providing training, tools, content to help develop sales people, and help them perform at the highest levels. […]
What’s Your Bell Curve Look Like?
We tend to think about organizational performance in terms of “bell curves” or some sort of distribution curve. The typical bell curve looks something like this: The performance of our people is on the X (horizontal) axis, the number of our people is on the Y (vertical) axis. The bell curve typically has us thinking that we have a small number of high performers (the far right side of the curve) and a small number of poor performers (the left side of the curve) and the bulk of our people are medium performers. We may segment the bell curve to […]
2018 Sales Management Critical Issues, Part 1
I’ll be doing a short series of posts on critical issues facing sales managers in 2018. Before going further, for those of you who have followed me for some time, these issues are no different than critical issues of prior years. But I’m seeing many of them achieving critical mass in terms of awareness and commitment to fix. Many might say, the critical issue is the same as it ha always been, making our numbers. Actually, making our numbers is the outcome of addressing the critical issues that drive our ability to achieve the numbers. The first critical issue I’ll […]