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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
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 […]
Introducing “Radical Lessness”
We live in a world where we seem to be driven by “Doing More.” As sellers, “more” is the mantra–more dials, more calls, more meetings, more activities. When we fall short of our goals, the answer is to do more. But, it’s not just sellers that are consumed with doing more. Every manager or executive I meet is consumed by the demand for more. I look at their calendars, their to do lists, there is always more. I talk to them about their “guilt.” It’s always about how they can’t find the time to do all that they think they […]
Helping Managers Coach…
I suspect we all agree that coaching is important to the development of our people, and our own personal development. Perhaps a small number of people don’t really understand why it’s so important, but agree because it’s fashionable. But now we get into some of the dicey areas, moving beyond the theoretical statement about coaching, to making it happen. Most of the data shows: Too many managers aren’t coaching their people. For those that do coach, the amount of time they spend coaching is way too low (some research shows the majority of managers spend less than 90 minutes a […]
Sales Enablement, The Sound Of One Hand Clapping
Again, I have to start this post with an apology. I’m a huge fan of sales enablement and some of the outstanding sales enablement practitioners who I count as friends. I think, however, one of the biggest problems with sales enablement is not what they do, or the quality of the programs they develop. I think one of the biggest problems with sales enablement comes from outside the organization, with sales executive leadership and front line management. Recently I had a fascinating conversation with a sales enablement team. It’s a team that I think of as modeling some of the […]