Dave Brock
Dave Brock
Dave has spent his career developing high performance organizations. He worked in sales, marketing, and executive management capacities with IBM, Tektronix and Keithley Instruments. His consulting clients include companies in the semiconductor, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, computer, telecommunications, retailing, internet, software, professional and financial services industries.
Pricing And Discounting Are Different!
As usual, I’ve stuck my nose into some on-line discussions. This time, the discussion started on “creating value,” and devolved into a discussion of discounting.…
“Commander’s Intent,” Trust, And Sales Performance
In military history, there has long been the concept of “Commander’s Intent.” Great leaders recognized they could never anticipate and plan for everything that might…
False Choices: Transactional Versus Solution Selling Approaches
Often, I get into conversations about the sales approach a company deploys. There are questions of, “should we be transactional, product, solutions, consultative focused?” Often,…
Apples And Oranges
Let’s imagine that for some reason you want to evaluate the performance of apples. You might develop criteria and compare apples to those criteria. You…
Data, Data Everywhere….
“Water water everywhere, Nor a drop to drink…” is a famous line from Coleridge’s “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.” At a recent lunch, my…
“The Art Of The Bluff”
I was stunned and appalled to read an article sponsored by a major sales publication promoting the “Art of the bluff.” The author was cautious…
How Performance Reviews Can Kill Organizational Culture
I’m an unabashed fan of Shane Parrish and the Farnam Street Blog. I study everything they publish, listen to every podcast, read every article and…
“The Boom In Sales Technology”
I suppose it’s normal to see the flood of articles, prospecting emails, calls and such on “sales technology.” Dreamforce is over, we all have visions…
It’s Account Planning Season, Again
Account planning is important, it’s fundamental to growing our value and positioning with our key customers. It helps us align resources and activities with the…
“Even Though I Hate Talking About Price……”
Someone has been prospecting me, trying to provoke me to respond and take a call. In reality, if he spent two minutes looking at our…
Committed To Stupidity
Sadly, every day I see more sales people committed to stupidity. It’s not making mistakes, misunderstanding situations, even some errors in judgement. As bad as…
Being Mentored And Mentoring
Mentoring takes all forms, some of the more unusual are the most helpful, particularly in my experience. Through my own career, I have had a…
Sales Managers “Closing Business”
I was struggling to meet with a sales manager. He really wanted to talk, we had critical issues he had asked for help in addressing.…
Expecting Our People To Think For Themselves
I’ve not been following my normal cadence of blog posts the past couple of weeks. Normally I publish 4-5 a week, in the past two…
Predictable Buying
We spend lots of time and money trying to create predictable revenue, increasing the predictability of our sales approaches. We constantly engineer, refine, tune and…
Getting Things Done
It seems our days are consumed with meetings. We have meetings to develop win strategies for a deal. We have meetings to develop proposals. We…
Pipeline Quality And Integrity
I must have done thousands of pipeline reviews over my career. Somewhat casually, I toss around the terms “Pipeline Quality And Integrity” Usually, we get…
Why Do 95% Of Customers Buy The Last Day Of The Quarter?
If I’m to believe the pipelines I spend lots of time reviewing, there is an odd phenomenon, at least 95% of customers make their purchase…
Deal Strategies, Helping The Customer Buy
Recently I wrote, “What If We Kept The Target Close Date Sacred?” It focused on improving our pipeline management, discipline, and integrity. But the way…
What If We Kept “Target Close Date” Sacred?
Just finished one of those “aha” conversations with a client. Thought I would share the concepts with you. One of the things I pay a…