Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
“We Need To Do More To Help Our Sales People!”
It seems everywhere I turn, there is a huge urgency around “helping” our sales people sell more. Clearly, the data on sales performance is startling, though not new. The percent of sales people meeting or exceeding their plans is declining. The percent of organizations not making their plans is staggering. Everyone is recognizing the changing customer. First they are becoming impossible to reach (perhaps an intended or unintended consequence of the deluge of prospecting emails/calls). Second, more buying decisions end in “no decision made,” so they struggle to buy. Our sales people need help in more effectively engaging these struggling […]
What’s Your One Goal For Each Person On Your Team?
Too often, as managers, if we do coach, our coaching is ineffective. One of the key reasons is that we are unfocused on what we are trying to achieve with each person. What happens is that we see skills that need to be developed, new habits that need to be solidified, behaviors we need to change. In our coaching, we try to achieve all of these things with the sales person. We may do this in a single one on one, deal review, call review, or whatever conversation we have. Our intentions are good, we are trying to help our […]
Putting Yourself In Your Customers’ Shoes
As sales people, we need to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. Organizationally, we need to understand their business, markets, industry, key strategies/drivers, key challenges, how things get done within the company, and more. Individually, we need to understand what makes them tick, what they worry about, what their personal goals/ambitions are, how they are measured, how they spend their days, and more. The better we are at connecting with them–where they are, the more effective we will be in identifying how our products and solutions might help them achieve their goals. We want to be able to mirror their […]
Changing Channel Dynamics, Driving Channel Success In The Face Of Changing Customers
Channels have always been a critical part of most organizations’ Go To Customer strategies. They are critical to extending our coverage of the market, accessing markets with specialized expertise, and in helping provide our customers more complete solutions. Managing channels for optimum performance in the face of rapidly changing buying processes and cloud based solutions creates challenges neither suppliers nor channel players have faced in the past. For example, many of the IT centric products and services are seeing radically changing buying–shifting out of IT into end users. This drives a change in the channel, helping them shift their approaches […]
Getting Customers To Talk To Us
Universally, it seems the biggest challenge sales people face is getting customers to talk to us. Every sales person I meet, most of the articles I read focus on how we get customers to talk to us. There is endless research on why customers and prospect don’t like talking to sales people. We know customers are seeking to self educate–surprisingly visiting our company websites, but not wanting to talk to us. Visiting other websites, participating in other discussions, looking to other resources. It seems that customers want to learn and are actively engaged in learning—but from anyone but us. Increasingly, […]
The Importance Of Establishing A Cadence
It seems in nature, as well as business there is a rhythm to the way things work. Disrupt that rhythm and problems start to occur. We use all sorts of terms to describe that rhythm. In science we describe this as a “steady state.” A system, whether it’s a physical process, chemical process, is in balance with the right flow. Sometimes scientists use the word “equilibrium.” In nature, there are all sorts of rhythms–the tides, the seasons, sun rise/set, currents, and so forth. Disrupt these rhythms, sometimes terrible things happen — a lot of the climate change discussion is really […]