Episode 77: David Brock

Introduction: I've had the privilege of being in and around banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from ledgers to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same. Banking is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

Welcome to Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. It's brought to you every week by our friends at RelPro and Vertical IQ. After six decades in banking, it's time to give back. And I really hope this program amplifies that. Every week, I feature top voices in financial services, Bankers, consultants, best selling authors, and more. The goal here is simple. It's to provide insights, success practices, and to bring you a few ideas that you can use in 2024 to maximize your results. 

My guest today is David Brock. Dave has invested four decades of his life helping sales professionals and sales leaders build great careers and maximize their results. Dave earned a degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Anderson School of Management at UCLA. Dave launched partners in excellence in 2002 to help international clients outperform and outsell their competitors. Dave's book, Sales Manager Survival guide, is one of the top authorities on how to take a team to the next level of success. And it's one of my favorite all time sales management books. It's my interview with Dave Brock on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. Here we go. I just wish that you all could hear what we talk about before we hit the record button, because it's great.

My guest today is Dave Brock, and I have followed Dave for many, many years. My friend Ned Miller introduced me to Dave a number of years ago, and he's amazing, and you're going to see that today. Dave, thanks for being with us.

Dave Brock: Well, geez, I hope I can live up to that introduction. Jack. It's really a privilege to be on this podcast. Thanks for inviting me.

Jack Hubbard: Well, you'll do that and certainly more.Let's start talking about partners in excellence, your firm, what you do and how you help clients.

Dave Brock: Yeah, I form partners in excellence about 91, 92. And that had been after a short period where I'd been doing turnarounds as a CRO or CEO and so on. And I wanted to find a way to kind of systematize that. And so I built a consulting company. And we grew in the number of people that we had over the years. We currently have about 15 people scattered around the world. And what we tend to do is we tend to focus on much m larger organizations. I guess our proactive outreach and prospecting is to much larger organizations in technology, industrial products and professional services primarily. and also the bulk of what we do is for very large organizations and it's problem and project oriented type stuff. 

So we do a lot of work around business strategies and how companies grow and how companies perform overall. and then we do a lot of the customer-facing stuff, which is to go to market sales, marketing, customer experience and that kind of thing. And most of what I write about is really on the go to market side and all. But that's kind of what we do. And as I say, we primarily focus on, very, very large global organizations. But also, we have a smattering of smaller, earlier stage organizations. And that happens because a lot of our clients have gone out of large organizations to be CEO's or CROs or something in an early stage organization. And they ask us to come and help them.

Jack Hubbard: Outstanding. When you talk about strategy, we're going to get into a couple of your books, but one thing that's interesting to me is we're both veterans, and we've been around a long time, been doing this a long time. And some would say, well geez, you're getting up there in years. Why do you use LinkedIn so effectively? It seems to be a younger person's medium, and it really isn't. You use it very, very effectively. And my question really does revolve around strategy. I see on LinkedIn a lot, you advise CEOs and leaders in companies a lot from a large company perspective. And from your clients perspective, what are you seeing CEO's do in terms of using LinkedIn? or, are they not using it as much as you would like?

Dave Brock: Ah, and it varies for the large organizations that we work with. I don't see CEO's or even top management using LinkedIn as effectively as they might. You know, I think there's so m much power to the voice of a senior executive, on things like social media. Here are things that we're driving for as a company. Here's what we want to achieve. Here's what, you know, it's not selling products or so, but talking about the culture, the vision, the business strategy and those things. And I think having the CEO, the CRO, the CFO, even, you know, executives in product development and manufacturing present points of view. I think one tells you much more about the company in ways that are different from people and customers and prospects. Might learn, and I think they humanize it, and put kind of a personality or face behind it. So I don't think people in large organizations do it very well. In some of the startup organizations in the early stage, particularly in technology, you see them, perhaps overusing it and abusing it in ways that probably aren't as helpful as they might be. And also, you know, happiness is somewhere in between. but I do think leaders of medium to larger organizations can be using it much, much more effectively.

Jack Hubbard: It's modeling the way in this book, which I've reread a number of times. I think it's on page 64. One of the things you talk about is you ask a question, you ask several questions, and one of them is, if you want your CRM system to be used inside your company, how are you as a senior executive using the CRM? It's the same thing with LinkedIn. If you want your people to be using it in the right way, you need to model the way. And we're going to talk about that a little bit. Well, you've been doing this for 48 years.

Dave Brock: I didn't realize that until you pointed that out.

Jack Hubbard: It's all about wisdom. and you start out at IBM and had a really good run there, and then you've run your own companies and done a lot of different kinds of things. And you see a lot in sales. We're going to talk about sales and sales leadership today.

What are some things over the past 48 years that you've seen in sales? Dave? Good and maybe not so good. What's going on in sales?

Dave Brock: So kind of the good, bad and ugly. I think what I do see is the underlying principles to kind of high impact selling remain the same. It's kind of like some of the basic principles in say, physics or science and things like that. The underlying principles remain the same. Things about, you know, caring for customers around, helping them change and solve problems and grow and improve, all those principles are the same. The tools and techniques that we leverage to implement those principles have changed profoundly, and a lot for the positive. For instance, right now, technologies like AI and some of the other kinds of sales automation technologies have enabled us to do things, much, much more efficiently, than we were able to do them in the past. I looked at prepping for a sales call when I was a, ah, youngster, versus prepping for doing the same. Prep for a sales call right now. I can get much richer perspectives now because of technology and all that. I look at things like AI and M. Right now we're in the very, very early stages of AI. And so mostly what I see is my misapplication of it. But used correctly, AI can really help us think about what we're doing and how we're engaging customers. So the fundamental principles are the same. 

Technology and other things have enabled us to start applying those principles in very intriguing ways. I think the biggest kind of, so that's kind of the positive side of it, the negative side of it is I've seen really a few kinds of interrelated trends. One is the transnationalization and the dehumanization of the selling process. And we tend to think of customers as widgets that go along our assembly line. and there's been a lot in terms of applying kind of agile, lean and manufacturing principles to selling. and they've been applied in very, very poor ways. And so the understanding and caring for customers, really the understanding of customers has become virtually non existent. And so customers become widgets on our assembly line, and likewise, salespeople have become easily replaceable widgets on our sales assembly line. So the whole kind of dehumanization and commoditization of people and relationships has been rampant. And we see that in the results. 

We see that in attrition and turnover. I look at, depending on the data, you see, average tenure in an organization, of salespeople at all levels, salespeople up, through top sales leaders is somewhere eleven to 18 months. And I start, most of what we work on are people with very, very complex sales processes and long sales and buying processes. And I kind of scratch my head and say, well, let's see, eleven to 18 months, it probably takes you nine to twelve months to onboard a person. It takes them sometime, maybe nine months to a year to build a pipeline. And then their sales cycles are twelve and some of our customers are two years. And so I start adding that up and saying, wait a second, the math doesn't work. and so you just see that because of this kind of ah, commoditization of transnationalization and dehumanization of sales, we see results plummeting. 

So turnover is high. We see 83% of customers would prefer a rep free environment because reps aren't being helpful for them. Well, it's understandable if we have that churn. And then we see things like win rates plummeting. Today, win rates of 15% to 20% are considered acceptable. And I half jokingly say I used to fire people when their win rates went below 30%. and we see sales cycles lengthening, we see average deal values going down. So this whole thing that gets to kind of taking the humanity and human to human connection out of the process and trying to mechanize it has produced just devastating results. And we're now starting, the optimistic part is we're now starting to see, I think the pendulum has swung as far over to one side as possible. And what gives me great hope for the future of selling is people are starting to see how that's broken. And the pendulum is starting to slowly, swing back. Not fast enough for my taste, but we see it slowly starting to swing back. Trey.

Jack Hubbard: Well, and I think as much as you and I love LinkedIn, and we're on it, I think part of the dehumanization of this is this platform in many ways, because I've had Bankers call me and say, you know, I've gotten off of LinkedIn because I didn't make any sales there. Well, you're not going to make any sales there. You start the conversation there. So I think you're right about dehumanization.

I'm also curious about something we talked about before we started taping, and that's complexity. The buyer journey is different than it was a while ago. They have more resources to be able to know what they want. Maybe before the salesperson gets there, there might be more people in the buying decision team than ever before. So you mentioned complexity, Dave. Talk about that a little bit in the sales process.

Dave Brock: Yeah, well, I think one is, and I've done a lot of studying and work on complexity and complexity theory. And one of my favorite kinds of theories is developed by a gentleman by the name of David Snowden, who runs a company out of whales called Kunovin. and he's kind of looked at complexity theory, and he's kind of mapped it into several different quadrants. And, one is kind of this simple or transactional type of quadrant. One is complicated, one is complex, and one is chaotic, and there's some other nuances to it. But once you look at that as a framework, you can start saying, how do I work in the transactional environment? And that's the thing about known gnomes. So it's really, you have customers who are expert and experienced at buying, and there's certain ways of working effectively with those. And the transactional selling process works very well there. There you have knowledgeable people who know what they're doing. They've done this lots and lots of times before, even almost on a daily basis. and so what they're trying to do is get as efficient a buying process as possible. So you work on that.

The complicated, where I think most of us tend to be is, the area of known unknowns or the area of expertise. And this is where I think salespeople today and my sales executives are missing so much opportunity. Most of, I think, 100% of our clients and most of, I think the clients we find in the world are in this complicated space where it's new to them. They've never experienced it before. If you look at typical complex buying, they have their day jobs, and all of a sudden this has changed, this problem they're experiencing. They don't know the questions they should be asking, what they should be looking for. They don't know how to organize, to go through the process. They've never gone through the process before. Or if they did, it was years ago. And the world has changed since then. 

So they literally don't know what they don't know. But in this space, it's the area of expertise. And we as sellers, come in as experts, because we go through that every day with hundreds and hundreds of customers. So we can bring a great deal of knowledge and expertise to help customers navigate that. And if you look at things like a lot of the Gartner research, well, the CEB Gartner research, kind of under challenger and the challenger customer and all that, or you look at a lot of what, Matt, Dixon and Ted McKenna have done with jolt and all that is it's dealing with this thing of, how we drive change. How do we manage a project front to end? How do we do it effectively? How do we deal with committing to change? How do we deal with fear of messing up? How do we make sense of all this conflicting information we see? You basically see sellers kind of acting as orchestrators and bringing in targeted expertise through the process, and also integrating some sort of a digital buying journey into that. 

So you see those kinds of things. I don't think people are paying enough attention to that in organizing around. If our customers are primarily in this complicated space, how do we deal with it in the complex space and chaotic space, even worse in their techniques for doing that. But most of what we do in selling is probably transactional and complicated, maybe bordering complex. And those are very known techniques, but people aren't leveraging them. And too often we find people trying to apply transactional techniques to a complicated situation. and they fail. They fail the customers. And that's why customers are saying, I don't need salespeople. What you can help me on are the things I don't need help on, and you're not providing me the help where I really do need help.

Jack Hubbard: I think you made a really key point there in that if I'm a buyer of any size company, because my resources are so limited, I had better not mess up with who I buy from. And therefore, the professional salesperson of today.

And we're going to talk a little bit about the kind of an interesting study you're doing with salespeople. The salesperson of today has got to be an educator. They've got to be a value provider. They've got to be a resource. And I think it goes back to your comment about the transaction. Too many salespeople are out selling a widget, and the buyer didn't want to buy a widget. They can buy that from anybody. What they really help. And a lot of times, they're not getting it.

Well, I want to talk about help, because in 2016, you wrote a book that's helped a ton of sales managers, the sales manager survival guide. I have read this over and over again, Dave, and I've got marks upon marks on almost every page. talk about the inspiration for this book back in 2016. What was it that said to you? I got to put this on paper?

Dave Brock: Yeah. And I guess it was kind of the culmination of, I mean, years of working with all sorts of clients and seeing particularly frontline sales managers who really wanted to do a good job, but they were struggling. They just didn't know what their jobs were. They didn't know how to do that. You know, how do I coach? How do I do reviews? How do I look at recruiting and hiring? How do I look at getting support within the organization? So what I wanted to do was create just a little guidebook to help them answer those questions. And if you look in the book, there's something like 60 plus chapters and no chapters over more than five or six pages. But what it does is it takes an issue, and it kind of highlights what this is. What are ways to think about it, and what are ways to act about it? I don't remember exactly, but I think I have somewhere around 35 to 40 pages on coaching so I barely get into coaching. And if you really want to get into coaching deeply, go to, like, Keith Rosen's books, who? Keith is one of the best experts on sales coaching in the world and he has hundreds of pages of really great content. And also what I wanted to do was provide sales managers a guidebook to start, get started in really understanding their job and how to do the job. And there are other resources, for instance, like Keith's book or resources that we provided through our workshops or through kind of supplemental materials that were in sales manager's survival guide, we go very wide, but this deep, there's some supplemental resources where we go very, very deep into a specific issue.

Jack Hubbard: Well, you wrote the book in 2016, and you blink your eye, and that's 2024, eight years later. Amazing. If you were going to rewrite this book today, or if you were going to add to some chapters today on sales manager's survival guide, what would you add?

Dave Brock: I don't know that I'd add a whole lot. I think what I would add is much more on the people and human to human focus and all. And if you see, you know, why do we have such high levels of attrition and turnover and so on and so forth? You see, going back to what I said earlier, a lot of the humanity and values and beliefs, understanding of that within the organization has gone away. so I'd add a little bit more about that. In the upcoming sales executive survival guide. I really dive deeply into the things like culture, value, beliefs, and how that really drives organizational excellence. Not so much the technology, process, tools, organizational structure. So I'm putting a lot of that because I think that's more the focus in purview of top executives, in the tone they set in the culture and value system they set for the organization. 

The other thing I'd add to the sales executive survival guide is a little bit more, the sales manager survivor guide is a little bit more on technology and the use of technology, and all because we see so many people. Well, you know, it's interesting. We spend millions and millions and millions of dollars on technology, but we aren't using it, and we aren't getting the value we should get out of it, out of the investments we're getting we've made right now, and we overlay that with AI, with chat, GPT, and those kinds of things, and it becomes even more chaotic. So I put a little bit on technology and technology's place and how we can start leveraging it much more effectively.

Jack Hubbard: The first section of your book is so vital because every day new sales managers are being promoted or they're hired into a new organization and have to meld into the culture. I just love the first. I think it's about 46 chapters. I'm a new sales manager. I'm just coming into a bank or a technology company. Talk about some advice you would have for me. I've never done this before. I'm a salesperson. Never done this before. What advice would you have for me to help me hit the ground running?

Dave Brock: So I think a couple of key things. Which part was the motivator for writing the book is understanding your job as different. Understand what your job is. And that's the biggest issue I see is I get in front of groups of sales managers and I say, you know, what's your job? And they look at me, they roll their eyes, they say, oh, you got white hair, you're an old fart, you don't get it. And that kind of thing. And I said, well, what's your job? And they say, making the numbers. I said, no, that's not your job. That's your people's job is to make the numbers. What your job is is to maximize their performance and maximize their ability to do their jobs. And so it's a huge mindset change to say, my job isn't to make the numbers. 

My people's job is to make the numbers. But how do I enable them to do that? Through coaching for providing them tools, processes, the support and all those things. What are the things that I do to maximize their performance? So one understands the job. And most managers, even people who've been in the job for a long time, don't understand what their job is. Then two, if you're a new manager, whether you've been promoted within an organization or you're new to the organization, there's a propensity for us to do what I call ready, fire, aim. We are action oriented, so we want to go in and make some changes to show our impact and that we're making a difference, but we don't know what changes we need to make, and we may be making the wrong thing. So I'd say walk around and learn, in pursuit, ah, of excellence. 

Decades ago, the book came out and came out with this management. By walking around as a new manager, in a job, go walk around with your people, understand what they do, understand how they work, understand where their problems are, go talk to your customers, understand who they are, what the interrelationship is with sellers and with the company and so on, what the reputation is. Look within your own company and say, how do things get done? And start learning before you take action. Now, you can do that fairly quickly and you can learn very, very quickly. but too many times we leap to action before we know what we're trying to do. So, you know, take your 1st 90 days or so, you know, and sometimes if you're more experienced, you can compress that and get it done in a little shorter period of time. Time or in a smaller organization, you could get it done in a shorter period of time. But learn first before you act.

Jack Hubbard: Yeah. I've always been a very big proponent of urgent patience. I think that we need as sales leaders and executives to be patient enough so that when someone goes through training, the behaviors that they've learned become internalized. So we need patience. Salespeople need a sense of urgency. Who am I going to have a great conversation with today when you kind of blend those two together? you're in really good shape, and that's part of what I learned in your book.

In our industry, in banking, there are some cultures that are really good at coaching. There are some regions within banks that are pretty good at coaching. There are coaches within regions in banks. They're pretty good at coaching in general. Our industry is pretty poor at it. We're good at deal coaching, we're good at a lender brings a deal to a sales manager and they say, here, take a look at this. What do you think? That's fine. I'm talking about proactive behavioral coaching.

What's the state of coaching in other industries that you're seeing, Dave?

Dave Brock: I think it's not dissimilar to what you see in banking, I think the state of coaching is pretty much all over the place. and all you see a lot of research data by various different market research organizations that talk about how much time do managers spend coaching every week? And what's the perception of salespeople? Do they perceive they're being coached? And managers, managers always, always perceive that they're doing great coaching. And salespeople always, always perceive that they're not getting great coaching or enough coaching. And also there's always that chasm. 

And then you start looking at the amount of time and it's amazing to me some of the research studies show that managers spend less than an hour in total every week coaching, and all. But I think underneath this is, I think we don't understand what coaching is. And since writing the book, my own thinking on coaching has evolved a little bit. But you know, too often what I see people doing is separating coaching from the fabric of the business. So we schedule a coaching one on one, then we schedule a deal review or pipeline review or an account review or prospecting or whatever it is, and we separate those things. and in the book I talk about how do you integrate it, how do you kill two birds with 1 st? 

How do you do the business management process of say, a pipeline review or a forecast review, and how do you take that opportunity for coaching as well? And over the years, we've seen a lot of our clients make huge progress in terms of integrating that. So coaching is integrated into all the meetings and business management processes. Where we've seen problems is, it's always been the same issue packaged in different way. How do I find the time? and so what we've evolved to, and we just completed, I think, one of the most remarkable programs with a huge client in Australia. and they drove a lot of my thinking in this is how do we turn every conversation into a coaching conversation? Is I had in the book positioned, how do I coach, deal reviews, how do I coach account management? How do I do those kinds of things? But now we're starting to see how we turn every conversation into a coaching conversation. 

So maybe you and I are going out for a cup of coffee, and while we're standing in line at Starbucks, you know, we start talking about some of the things that I might be doing and you might start saying, Dave, have you ever considered this? Or what if you tried this or things like that. So what we're trying to do is create something called the language of coaching or the language of collaborative conversations, that every conversation becomes a coaching conversation. What's interesting and what we've learned with this client is we started with managers turning every conversation into a coaching conversation. And we started, we developed these fundamentals of what we call collaborative conversations because we believe coaching should not be me telling you or you telling me something, but how do we learn together and improve together? 

And so we talk about collaborative conversations. What we've discovered with this client is those are the conversations they need to be having with their customers. So we first started training managers in kind of coaching through collaborative conversations. Now we're training the salespeople who have a good base and challenger to say, how do we turn every conversation with a customer into a coaching collaborative conversation? And it's just amazing because it's exactly the same principles applied in a different context.

Jack Hubbard: And it's so natural. People really must love that because it's just a dialogue. And I got to believe that the manager will say, you know what? I learned as much from this conversation as you did. Thanks very much. And now, you get the person that becomes more coachable, because you both learn something that's terrific.

Dave Brock: And if we go back to a few minutes ago in our conversation where we talked about customers dealing in complicated situations, things that they've never experienced before, now, when I can engage those customers in collaborative conversations, or I can bring my expertise with their experience and expertise, and together we can learn and move forward, it's really remarkable. You know, in some of this work, we found, we call it, we packaged part of this as what we call business, focused selling. 

So, you know, the principle and what we've seen great results of is let me start talking to the customer about their business and their problem, and let me not talk about my product, even if the customer asks me about my product, because what they need to understand and is their problem, the impact on the business, what they should be asking questions about, who they should be involving, and so on and so forth. So we find when we go through that process of kind of collaborative conversations focused on the customer, we find three things happen. One is win rates skyrocket because you're building trust and confidence with the customer, so you end up being in a preferred position. So, for instance, most of the clients we work with have had pretty good win rates. But, like, one very excellent client has gone from 50%, about 55, 57% win rates, up to 82% win rates.

Jack Hubbard: That's huge, Dave.

Dave Brock: So the next thing we see is no decisions made plummet. If you look at what Matt and Ted wrote about in jolt, the jolt effect is 60% of committed buying efforts and a no decision made. And so you start saying, what does that happen? Describe what they describe much better in chulp. But you start saying, if we can work on building their confidence and helping them make sense of that, we can reduce no decision made. And so we've only started measuring that in the last year and a half or so, and so far, we've seen reductions of 20%, or so. But then the other most interesting thing is sales cycles reduced by 30% to 40%. And what you start saying, how does that happen? And what happens is, because they're so inexperienced at this. If you go back to years ago, Ceb and Gartner came out with what I call the spaghetti chart, it's the customer journey, and they wander all over the place. They start, stop, shift direction, shift. Priorities wander more and more. And we've seen the data on sale buying cycles expanding because they don't know what they're doing and they don't know how to buy. But we can act as navigators for that process, so we can help them navigate through that buying process very effectively and very efficiently. So that's what happens when you help them do that. Buying cycles reduce by 30% to 40%. And so it's, you see all the same kind of fundamentals around caring for customers, understanding them around collaborative learning, collaborative problem solving conversations and things like that produce just stunning results. when we implement those, it's so.

Jack Hubbard: Counterintuitive, it's like golf. If you swing as hard as you possibly can, the ball will go nowhere. if you grip the club too tight, you're going to go to the right. just relax, swing easily.

One thing I want the audience to really remember is something that Dave said, brilliant. He didn't say it exactly this way. It's a discovery call. Customer says, talk to me about your XYZ treasury management loans. We fall into a horrible trap and part of it is because we've educated the customer that that's what they expect us to do. So I got a call from, and what Dave says is pull back. Don't present a product on the first call. I've trained for years. So I get a call from a banker and the banker says to me, I got a real problem. He says, my people present a product on the first call and they're not getting back into a second call. I said, well, why don't you just stop that? He said well, the buyer is forcing us into presenting a call. 

So I said, have your Bankers asked this question? When a buyer says, talk to me about your loans, have the salesperson say, you know, Mister Johnson, it's interesting, I'm just trying to get to know you, trying to understand your situation a little bit. If your salespeople were asked about their product on the very first call, what would you want them to do? And the buyer just kind of sits back and says, you know, that's really good, I'd want them to kind of ask some more questions. Banker says, do you mind if I ask a few more questions? Boom, you've redirected. And the banker called me back and said it was brilliant. And it's so simple to do, Dave, as long as you focus on the buyer and not your product. Fascinating.

Dave Brock: And again, it's interesting. And what we've seen in the results is when you shift that focus and make it about them. In our collaborative learning process, the results we produce for ourselves skyrocket and occur faster than going in and pitching our product. And responding to what we have conditioned customers to do is all we talk about is our product. So they feel obligated to say, tell me about your loans, tell me about your product and that kind of thing.

Jack Hubbard: Yeah, yeah. you know, this is one of these interviews where we hit the record button, I forgot to report. We're just talking. It's fun. This is great.

and I know you don't have all day, so let me get to a lightning round with you. Opinions on a couple of things. The importance of a formal sales process. What do you say?

Dave Brock: Absolutely critical, but I don't think we understand. Sales process is when we confuse sales process and sales methodology. Each sales process, each company has a unique sales process. It has to do with their business strategies, their priorities, how they want to be perceived by their customers in their markets and so on and so forth. So we develop a process that is unique to us and our customers and our markets as an organization. Then what we do is we can take methodologies, whether we take something like challenger or value based selling or any kind of thing, and we overlay that on our sales process. 

But I think where we get confused is we confuse methodology and process and we actually don't, leverage our methodology. So what we talk to a lot of people on is things like what's your methodology? How do you know that you and the customer are aligned at this point? What are the next steps that you know to go through and that the customer needs to go through to be able to make progress on this journey. So it really has to be unique to your, your, to your organization. And sometimes because of the diversity of solutions we have, you actually find that you have to have a couple of sales processes. It's rare, but, but sales process is absolutely critical, but we have to understand what it is.

Jack Hubbard: Lightning round.

Question number two, CRM. But I don't want to talk about people using CRM. I want to talk about why more CRM systems, and maybe none of them do this, help sales managers keep track of team meetings and action plans post team meetings, one on one. What happened in the coaching? What was the action plan? Why aren't CRM m systems taking that next step, Dave, and helping sales managers become more efficient?

Dave Brock: Well, I'll answer that in two ways. One is I think CRM systems provide that capability today. but we aren't using it. So for instance, our organization happens to use Salesforce. I start my day in Salesforce. I open up Salesforce, I look at my calendar, I look at my meetings, I look at my to dos and action plans and so on. And some of it might be, you know, I have this, this deal thing I have to do and it takes me into the opportunity page of working with a client and so on and so forth. So we do this, when I meet with my people and coach them, we arrive at action steps and next steps. And those are recorded in CRM. 

So I can go and see what my action steps are? What are their action steps? One of my favorite reports within Salesforce is the delinquent activity report, and those kinds of things. So we have that. We just don't know how to use CRM as a tool. It is kind of keeping us updated on what our to dos are, what our next steps are and so on and so forth. So I think we don't use CRM, as well as we could. I think we get sucked up through all the evolutions of salesforce. The salesforce gui sucks. I hate using it, but I've learned how to use it and how to use it for benefit. The second thing though, what I see in the emerging tools is emerging AI tools. 

Being more proactive or prescriptive, saying, we're seeing these things happen, you might consider doing this. And so I think the prescriptive tools applied to CRM give us capabilities that we've never experienced before and that are very difficult for us. We tend to be reactive or next step orientated. But, some of the new AI tools can be a little bit more prescriptive. Looking down the road. These are the things you should be thinking about and doing.

Jack Hubbard: Outstanding. A couple more questions. You're in the midst of doing a very interesting LinkedIn series. I think 50 people have responded to this and the essence of it is why are you so interested in selling? What are you finding, Dave?

Dave Brock: Well, the reason I got into this in the first place is as I talk to customers, as I look at LinkedIn and things like that, I'm seeing a huge negativity about the job of selling from sellers themselves. Whether they're individual contributors all the way up to CROs is they tend to be going through the motions. They tend to, you know, they want to maximize their comp and so on and so forth, but their real lives are somehow, selling is what gets them that and they go live their lives. and I always thought selling is such a tough, challenging job. Why do you do something you seem to hate so much? 

So I started going around to people say, why do you love selling so much? and the audience has been diverse, from people who run multibillion dollar organizations to people who've been in sales for only a few months, people, whether it's transactional selling to complex or complicated selling, whether it's b, two b to c, b, to c b, two b, two c. People from around the world. And what I did is, I wanted to say, this is a tough job. What inspires you to excel? And they tell their stories about how they got into it. Almost universally, nobody purposely went into selling. They found themselves selling in some way. but two is they get great joy. And you see some underlying messages around things like learning the challenge of trying to deal with these very complex situations, and on the challenge of competing and winning. What comes through loud and clear is helping people, helping our customers live better lives. Literally, people say this. I want to see my customers in their families live better lives. And what I do helps them do that.

Jack Hubbard: Wow. It's really, it's just outstanding, Dave.

Well, you've been very more than kind with your time, and I appreciate it. But just a couple more questions I always like to ask folks that I interview. What books are you reading, what podcast are you watching? How do you sharpen your saw, Dave? What do you, what do you see and experience out there for yourself?

Dave Brock: Most of what I do is kind of outside selling. So right now I'm reading a book. It just came out a few weeks ago by Charles Duig on super communicators. and it has little to do with selling, but it's what stands in the way of our connecting with people effectively, of communicating with them, and how we become much better communicators. And so, you know, I tend to read a lot outside of selling, whether it's in other business, whether it's biographies, whether it's history, whether it's philosophy or economics or something like that. 

And I try to say, what can I learn from this and adapt into business and selling? and that way I'm starting to come up with new ideas, and different approaches and different ways of doing things within selling. I have lots of friends who've written lots of really great books and all, but you hear kind of the same ideas over and over again. And so what I'm trying to do is, I mean, and I value their books because there's a, sometimes I learn from them because there's a little tweak that I hadn't thought of before. But where I learned the most is, I call this artful plagiarism, is I look at spaces way outside of sales. Like, I'm reading a lot right now also on improvisation. So I'm reading a lot about how, how comedians do improvisation, how musicians improv, how actors and so on. And I'm saying there's a huge amount I can learn from that, and I can start applying to conversations we have with each other and our customers. so I look very far away from sales and very far away from business and say, what can I learn and adapt and bring into what I do every day and how I serve my clients every day?

Jack Hubbard: Outstanding. Dave. How can somebody get a hold of you if they want to chat?

Dave Brock: It's, LinkedIn. You know, just look at Dave Brock and you'll see a picture of the book in the background so you know that you have the right one. it's, look at my blog. It's partnersinexcellenceblog.com. And you can subscribe and reach me there or email me. It's, and you'll post it at the site, but just email me. You know, I love conversations. I learned so much from every conversation. So, I'd love to hear from people.

Jack Hubbard: Congratulations on an amazing career. Congratulations on all you do for your clients. These 52 minutes went by like nobody's business. Dave Brock, thank you so much for your time today.

Dave Brock: Oh, thank you. This has been such a privilege and huge amount of fun. I really appreciate it.

Jack Hubbard: Jackson, thanks for listening to this episode of Jack Rants with Modern Bankers with author, speaker, consultant, and my great guest, Dave Brock. Next week, we dig into some practical ways to be better seen as a thought leader on LinkedIn and much more with my great guest, Richard Bliss.

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