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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
Unintended Consequences, Games Sellers Play…
Too often, in trying to “manage performance,” we put in place rules, policies, processes, we find they fail to produce what we expected. Sometimes, surprisingly, it’s the opposite of what we hoped. People “game” the system. The gaming process is the natural reaction of people to respond these rules, even if they, wittingly or unwittingly, drive behaviors counter to what management is trying to achieve. We typically see “gaming” of processes when management puts “rules” in place. Just as an example, one of the most gamed metrics is “calls/dials.” It’s very easy, particularly with technology, for sales people to achieve […]
Buying Is Broken! What’s This Mean For Selling?
Report after report tell us that buyers are failing in their mission to solve a problem and buy a solution. We know 60% of committed buying efforts end in no decision made. For those remaining 40%, a huge percentage of them express regret. It doesn’t take much of a leap to recognize Buying Is Broken! Despite this, sellers keep their noses to the grindstone. They continue to do the same things they have always done, and if they don’t get the results they need, they do more–faster. (At the behest of their managers, for whom, “more” is the miracle cure […]
Managers, Our People Are Our Customers
What if we applied the principles of high impact, value creating selling to our work with our own people? What if we started applying the principles we leverage to create differential advantage, customer experience which drive retention, renewal, and growing our customers to our people. We know some things about our customers: They don’t care about how much we talk about our success, who we are, and our companies. We know they care most about their own success. They want to eliminate problems, address new opportunities, grow, achieve their goals. We know they don’t care about our goals and what […]
The Prospecting Call(s)
The phone rang, I absently picked it up, thinking it was another call that was scheduled about 10 minutes later. It ended up being the wrong call, it was a prospecting call, “Dave, this is Chris from……. We missed you at Dreamforce and wanted to talk about how you can leverage our tool at your company.” Not meaning to be nasty, I asked, “Do you know what our company does? What do you know about me?” Chris started guessing, “I think your company is…… I don’t really know about you.” I was pretty abrupt, I said, “You’ve got it all […]
So Now You Are A New Sales Manager, What’s Different?
First, congratulations, your first job as a sales manager is a huge step forward in your career. Now, don’t screw it up—you’ll get a lot of managers who will immediately congratulate you, shake your hand, smile then say, “What have you done for me lately?” Before I go on, let’s backtrack a little bit. How did you get here? Probably one of a couple of things happened. You are working for the same company and have gotten a big promotion, moving from an individual contributor role to the first line sales manager role. Alternatively, you competed for a sales manager […]
We Know About The “Digital Buying Journey,” But What Does This Mean About Digital Trust?
We know trust is important in all our relationships. We know that trust is critical in vendor/customer relationships. Charlie Green has helped us understand that trust is not an absolute, but is contextual. For example, trust in a simple buying transaction is different than the trust in a complex B2B decision. The level of risk of choosing incorrectly is different, consequently the way we view trust in those decisions differs. Charlie helped us understand some of the dimensions of trust worthiness with the trust equation: Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation But how do we establish trust […]