Dave Brock
Dave Brock is the founder of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a consulting and services company helping to improve the effectiveness of business professionals with strategy development, organizational planning, and implementation. Dave has spent his career working for and with high performance organizations, ranging from the Fortune 25 to startups, including companies such as IBM, HP, Nokia, AT&T, Microsoft, General Electric, and many, many more. The work Dave does with business strategies is closely tied to personal effectiveness of the people in the organization. As a result, Dave is deeply involved in the development of a number of training and coaching programs.
Latest
Learning to Teach
I’ve been writing about “teaching our customers” these days. Too often, what I see of teaching is a more advanced form of a pitch.
You Have to Start at the Beginning
Data shows customers may be 57-70% through their buying process before sales is engaged. Yet we’ve missed the most important part of the buying process.
Do You Know How Your Customer is Measured?
Metrics are important to knowing how we are doing in achieving our goals. Some of those metrics are critical in evaluating performance or to our compensation plans. Every sales person understands how they are measured and are driven to achieve their goals.
Before We Can “Teach” Our Customers, We Have to Learn From Them
Teaching our customers is a cornerstone of Challenger, Insight Selling, and just plain good sales practice. We want to help our customers learn. It’s actually not that new a concept—we’ve always taught our customers something. It used to be about our products, or our solutions, or our companies.
Don’t Get Distracted by the Numbers
As sales professionals, we’re obsessed with the “numbers.” Where are we year to date, what’s the forecast, what’s the pipeline look like, what are the activity levels, how many qualified leads do we have, and on and on and on.
The Trial
Trial programs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be highly customized demos or benchmarks. They can be installing equipment or systems at a customer site, letting them use them for a period of time.
The Problem with Turnover
I worry too many sales executives spend too little time understanding turnover and it’s impact on the organization. Even worse, are those leaders who tend to think of people as commodities, churning through people continuously (but those folks are probably not reading blogs like mine).
Coaching the Sales Process: Deal Reviews
Many sales managers really don’t know how to reinforce the sales process in their coaching and development of their sales teams. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on this topic from sales managers, and I suspect there are a lot more that are embarrassed to ask about this.
Always Be Closing!
Closing starts long before the first call we ever make on the customer. It starts with identifying our sweet spot—what problems are we the best in the world at solving, who has those problems. It’s virtually impossible to close, at least successfully, if we aren’t focused on the right customers.
“Checking In” is Not a Next Step!
For those of you that know me, this won’t be a stunning confession, but I really struggle with my impatience. So in deal reviews and pipeline reviews, it’s not unusual for me to interrupt, cutting to the chase, asking, “What’s next, when will it happen?”