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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
“Seek first to understand…..
One of the most important things a sales person can do with her customer is to “understand.” One of the most important things great leaders do is to try to “understand.” Instead, we tend to focus, selfishly, on being “understood.” That is, focusing on our own priorities, self interests, agendas and what we seek to achieve. Dr. Stephen Covey’s fifth habit, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” is a fundamental principle of selling and leadership, yet it is rare that I see this principle exercised. Until we understand our customers–individually and organizationally, we have no context in which […]
Do The Work!
I have to confess some exhaustion. Pundits and experts in social media, each promoting their own brand of miracle cure or short cut to success. “Do these 3 things and make your numbers!,” “With this tool/service, you will be overwhelmed with leads.” Likewise, I’m exhausted looking at organizations implementing their favorite “program du jour.” Whether it’s a new approach to engaging customers, a new tool or technique they read about in social media, or some other bright shiny object. They are excited about it for about a day, it becomes the core to their success, until the next day, when […]
It’s Not The Lack Of Information That Stops Us….
We live in a world with an abundance of information. One might, fairly, claim we are drowning in information/data. This is profoundly different from what we faced 5, 10, 15, or more years ago, when information availability was far more restricted. Back in the “old days,” finding high quality information, relevant to what we needed was very difficult. But today, the challenge is the opposite, we have too much good quality information. One would think, with this abundance would make things easier. We should be able to make better choices, more easily. Buying should be easier as customers find more, […]
“Doing More,” Is Not A Growth Strategy! Neither Are Miracle Cures!
As sales professionals, we are responsible for driving revenue growth for our companies. We are accountable for executing our overall corporate strategies and priorities in our chosen markets. We develop, or should be developing, “go to customer strategies” to achieve our goals. We assess things like our ICP. We look at how to we reach and engage the customers in our ICP effectively and efficiently. We assess our value creation and differentiation strategies. The strategy will look at things like overall structure and engagement process. Do we leverage channels and partners? Do we sell direct and what the organization we […]
Is “Helping Our Customers” Incompatible With Selling?
Recently, I’ve been reading a series of discussions debating the concept, “Can we really be driven by helping our customers while still focused on selling?” Some of the comments revolved around, “How can we sell if we are focused on being helpful? It’s incompatible to be driven by a goal to be selling a certain solution.” I have to confess reading the discussions several times, trying to understand the arguments being made. To be honest, there were only opinions suggesting sales people need to focus on selling products, less so being helpful. Somehow, it seems the argument is “It is […]
Whose Deal Is This?
Who in the sales organization owns the responsibility for a deal? Who is responsible for leading the development and execution of the deal strategy? Most of us would respond, thoughtfully, “It’s the sales person’s responsibility!” Sadly, though, in practice it looks very different. To many managers, often well intended, take the deal over, they end up running the deal strategy and execution, sometimes delightfully surrendered by the sales person. Let’s get back to basics. It’s the sales person’s responsibility to “make the number.” The managers’ jobs are to support their sales people in doing this. They do so by coaching, […]