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.
Building Your Personal Brand — Again
There’s a lot of discussion about how important it is for sales people to “build their personal brands.” I’ve written about this topic several times…
Customers And Rational Behaviors
Too often, I’m in reviews with sales people whining, “The customer is irrational!” They go through a litany of complaints, including: “They don’t understand our…
Building On Shaky Foundations
It was an interesting conversation. I was meeting with a very thoughtful sales executive. He was about to make some pretty big investments in training…
Do Your Salespeople Really Understand Their Numbers?
Every year, I meet with thousands of sales people and sales managers. Inevitably the conversations focus on sales performance and achieving their goals. We try…
Do We Need Sales People Any Longer?
Recently, I was at a meeting hosted by my friends at Gartner. Scott Gillum made a provocative suggestion, “Do we need outbound sales any longer?”…
Understanding Leverage
Leverage is an important concept in business, sales, and marketing. Unfortunately, we spend too little time understanding leverage and identifying leverage opportunities in coaching and…
High Performance Selling, Putting The Pieces Together
Have you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle? Recently, I was sitting in a hotel lobby. The staff had put out one of those 1000…
Looking For Answers In Different Places
This week, I had the privilege of sitting with some of the smartest people I know. We were talking about the challenges both sellers and…
Coaching Has A Shelf Life
We are most effective in coaching when we are focused on an observable behavior. That is, “I observed you doing this….” “When this happens, you…
Win Fast, Lose Faster
Losing fast, having the courage to walk away from a deal that you are highly unlikely to win is tough for everyone. But it’s actually…
What Is Networking?
In the “old days,” networking seemed to be about meeting people, learning about them, building a bit of a relationship. There was value in networking.…
Three Most Important Metrics In Sales
I hesitated writing this, I’m calling out a colleague who I think is providing very well intended, but misleading advice. This individual is genuinely trying…
What Do Uber Drivers And SDRs Have In Common?
Think of this post more as a thought experiment or even a wild ass prognistication. What do Uber drivers and SDRs have in common? Let’s…
The Sales Conversation
In some recent projects, I’ve had the opportunity to analyze sales conversations. I’ve been tracking conversations sales people are having, from the very first conversation…
If We Fixed Sales Execution, Would We Fix Sales?
Let’s try a thought experiment. You will see some of the assumptions are very simplistic, they will become obvious as we move through the thought…
Knowing “How To Win,” Makes You A Better Prospector!
Social media channels are dominated by top of the pipeline/funnel thinking. The answer to making your numbers is always more demand gen, lead gen and…
The Sales Person As “Contextualizer”
Context is everything! Each of our customers is different, each company has different goals, strategies, priorities, challenges, cultures, values. Though they may compete head to…
How Do You Win?
My good friend, Andy Paul, and I were talking about the state of selling today. We were commiserating about the absence of discussion about “How…
Our Customers Are Voting With Their Time
Several years ago, Gartner research on how customers allocate their time in the buying process indicated about 17% of their time is meeting with sales…
When Less Is More
It seems the universal answer to every sales performance answer is to do more. We’re chastised to close more deals, get more into the pipeline,…