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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
Give Your People The Chance To Do Their Jobs!
It’s funny, every once in a while I find myself in similar conversations with different executives. Each starts in a different place, but the underlying issues are all the same. A core issue has come up. It’s actually one that concerns me deeply. “Do we have enough confidence and trust in our people to let them do their jobs?” Let me unpack this just a little. To be able to answer that question with a resounding, “Absolutely, without a doubt,” we have to be clear about a number of things. First, do we have the right people in the job? […]
Ban “Corporate Glamour Charts!”
I was reviewing a presentation a client was preparing for a critical customer meeting. It looked exactly like the thousands of presentations I’ve seen. After the title and agenda chart, came a whole series of “corporate glamour charts.” You know what these are–we’ve all inflicted them on our customers/prospects, and had them inflicted on us. These are the bragging charts. They are the charts where we want to tell the customer how great we are. They always follow the same format. Usually some data about how big we are, how many people we have, our global locations, and all the […]
“Heroic Sales Efforts”
We all have them, the “Must Win Deals,” where we pull out all the stops. We do everything we need to do to win the deal. Often, we are at our most creative moments when we do these deals. We thoughtfully overcome every hurdle, we get the customer to think differently, we mobilize all the internal resources necessary to close the deal. We manage to present a powerful business case, to defend our value, to minimize discounting. Then there’s that adrenaline rush when we win! We pat each other on the backs, we celebrate! We are, justifiably, proud to have […]
Dear Outlook And Gmail Developers……
Dear Outlook, Gmail, and developers of all email systems. I have a feature request. Actually, it’s a feature removal request. I think it will improve the productivity of all email users, and how they value your tools. Please remove the “Reply All,” feature. I’m just about to join a meeting of more than 300 people. But many of them have have lost the meeting link. Rather than addressing their requests to the meeting organizer, they are using “Reply All…..” My inbox has exploded with requests. This is perhaps the most egregious example I’ve encountered. But I experience this everyday with […]
Are You Confident Enough In Your Value Not To Discount?
Discounting has reached Pandemic levels. It used to be something we used as a last resort, and only under extreme duress. Today, responding to a prospecting call earns a discount. Proposals come with a price and then either an automatically applied discount, or hints at a discount. Something like, “Buy by the end of the month and I can discount 15%!” Forget the adverse revenue impact. Discounting is a demonstration in our own lack of confidence in the value we create with our solutions! Stated differently, it’s like shouting to our customers, “We don’t believe in our solutions strongly enough […]
The Power Of Role Plays
You are probably shocked. “Dave doesn’t write about this stuff, he usually writes about much bigger issues, WTF is happening to him?” Actually, conducting role plays has been a powerful tool that we use both in our consulting, training, and coaching. I don’t think we use them enough. There are a lot of tools that offer alternatives to role plays. We can record calls, they will be analyzed, and provide coaching to the individual, “You asked 6 questions, you should have asked 4, you didn’t swear enough….” (Yes, know my cynicism about some of the advice given by the conversational […]