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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
Great Coaches Don’t Give Answers
Both managers and the people they coach often have the wrong impression of coaching. Too often, we go to our managers looking for answers. Great managers tend not to give answers. As people looking for coaching, too often we go to someone asking, “What should I be doing? Should I do this? What am I missing? As coaches, we tend to feel we have to provide answers, “Go do this… Try this…This has worked for me before, try it….” Usually, that’s followed by, “Let me know what happens then we will talk about what’s next.” Great coaches behave differently. They […]
Helping Your Customers Succeed
I got a LinkedIn message today from a great sales person. It was intended to be a humorous and fun comment, ” The only reason why I don’t click ‘like’ or comment your posts is just I would like to avoid that my customers can see that I am searching for new ways to convince them 😃 “ I deeply appreciated the comment and chuckled reading it. But on refection, I responded: ” 😉 Here’s a different point of view. Everything I write about is focused on helping customers succeed and grow. Through that, we succeed. Don’t you want your customers […]
Reinventing Selling!
The pandemic, social change, and economic crises impact all of us, personally, organizationally, and how we engage our customers. It has forced each of us to rethink, reset, and change. We all know that selling is changing profoundly. As much as some might wish that things get back to normal, we know that normal has changed forever–as it should. And as a result how we sell, how we engage customers, how we work will change–I think profoundly. A lot has been made of “virtual selling.” Many see that as the future of selling. Looking at moving from F2F presence to […]
Selling The Way You Buy
Today, I had a great text conversation with an outstanding sales manager. The time zones worked out–it was evening his time, so he had the time to be a little philosophical, it was morning my time, I was desperate to find something to write about. We were talking about general approaches to engaging customers more effectively. He had read an earlier article of mine about the topic and had questions. At a certain point in the conversation, he said, “I’m a buyer now, it’s changed everything I think about in how we sell….” It’s a fascinating point. As I reflect […]
Five Months And Counting, An Update
About 11:30 AM, on March 11, 2020 my plane touched down at John Wayne Airport. On my way home, I decided, I would be locking myself down for a period or time. Actually, the State of California was deciding this for a lot of it’s citizens, but given what I was hearing about the Pandemic, I knew it was the right thing to do. At the time, like many others, I thought this would be over after 2-3 months and I would resume my “road warrior,” lifestyle. It’s 5 months later, both my clients, most of their customers, and I […]
Are You So Busy Chasing Small Deals, You Are Missing The Important Deals?
I’m often amazed looking at the pipeline profiles of a lot of enterprise focused sales organizations. There is, often, a feeling the average deal size is significantly higher than it actually is. Usually, the average deal size, when you analyze the data, is significantly smaller than they think it is. A recent, somewhat extreme example with a large professional services company; they thought their average deal size was significantly above $5M. but when we actually did the analysis, the average deal was in the $350-500K range. Another organization, thought their average deals were above $250K, the reality was the average […]