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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
Why, What, How, Who, When, Where
We see versions of these words in different contexts. If you’ve ever been a journalist, these are the fundamental issues the journalist must address in any story. If you are a Simon Sinek fan, by now you have internalized his principles of “Start with why.” We don’t talk much about these principles in selling or as managers in leading our people/organizations. In looking at sales and engaging our customers, we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the What and How. We are inundated with training, content, articles, books on “You have to prospect, You have to build your […]
Diversity Is Critical, And Not Just For The Reasons We Think!
This is one of those posts that starts with an apology or a disclaimer. I hesitated writing it, because what I am writing can be so easily misinterpreted, or I may be very naive/poorly informed. (I’m less worried about the latter, I know I need to learn) Diversity is important–it’s critical for our organizations. We need to have diverse organizations across all dimensions: Gender, Race, Orientation, Religion, Nationality, Age and so forth. Diversity is important, not just because it’s the right thing to do. From the privileged white male perspective, we have to give women, people of differing race/ethnic backgrounds, […]
Culture, Values, Visible Leadership
So many of the discussions on sales and business performance focus on strategies, competitive positioning, product/service superiority, and even customer satisfaction/loyalty. As we talk about how we execute at the highest levels, depending on what a pundit is selling, the “secret” to success is the application of certain technologies, methodologies, training, programs, content, tools, processes. In sales, we’ve seen huge infusions of all of these, yet sales performance doesn’t improve, the percent of people achieving quota continues to plummet. More importantly, turnover and attrition is skyrocketing. Average tenure for sales people and managers is down to 16.5 months, and, I […]
Talking About Our Competitors
Not long ago, I read an exchange about how we should talk to our customers about out competitors. Some felt we should take a “leadership” position offering our views and insights to the customer. Frankly, I was appalled with some of the opinions in that discussion. We have no business talking about our competitors products and business. I don’t make that statement around any sort of high-minded position about fair play, it’s simply a no-win discussion for us to conduct. First, we don’t know anything about their products and companies—far too many sales people struggle to understand their own products […]
Doing The Whole Job
Our jobs, as sales people and managers, are complex and multifaceted. To simplify it, we tend to divide what we do into a lot of different pieces. For example, as sales people, we may look at territory or account management, prospecting, managing opportunities through the buying cycle, call planning/meeting management, pipeline management/forecasting, administrative functions, time management, training/learning and so forth. As managers we may look at business management, planning, performance management, recruiting/onboarding, coaching, training, team building, expense management, strategic planning, working with our sales people on deals, visiting customers, solving problems for our people, and more. In doing our jobs, […]
The Future Of Selling, It’s About People, Connecting In A Disconnected World
I wrote, The Future Of Selling Isn’t What You Think It Is. Basically, it was a retort to those who think the future of selling is about the technology and tools we leverage. Whether it’s Zoom, social networking, CRM, messaging apps, AI/ML, or any of the 1000’s of technology solutions sales people leverage. Technology is part of our future, but it misses the core of what selling is really about. Selling is about people, it’s about connecting with people in some way that is meaningful and impactful to each. But let’s extend the discussion beyond selling to work. For most […]