Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
“I’m Selling As Hard As I Can, Why Aren’t You Buying?”
The universal lament of sales people is, “Why aren’t my customers buying? I’m busting my ass selling to them?” We make dozens of prospecting calls, send hundreds of emails. We find customers with some level of interest, then do everything we can to convince the customers to buy our products. We train ourselves about our products, become masters at pitching them and comparing them favorably with the competition. We spend hours mastering the “killer demo.” We know how to handle every objection, we’ve mastered closing techniques. Some few of us have even understood the customers’ businesses a little, translating our […]
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The current pandemic and financial crises create an unprecedented opportunity to engage our customers in high value and impact ways. In normal times, helping the customer understand and committing to change is, often, the biggest challenge. It is human nature to resist change. Unless the pain of doing nothing is greater than the pain of change, the rational decision for many is to do nothing. Too often, our customers my not recognize the need to change or have no sense of urgency around changing. Today, our own organizations, our suppliers, our customers, our competitors all face a changed world. For […]
“Why Did This Happen?”
One of the most positive things about sales people and leaders is their “action orientation.” Great sales people are driven to take action. Whether its prospecting to find new customers, or moving an opportunity forward, or getting support from within their own organizations or within their customers. Likewise managers want to make sure they have the right people, doing the right things. They want to see the right activity levels, the progress with opportunities, full pipelines, strong account/territory plans. When there’s a problem, for example a stalled opportunity, or anemic pipelines, there’s a propensity to leap into action. Perhaps breaking […]
Pandemic Prospecting
I don’t mean to be insensitive to the challenges we all face in dealing with the COVID 19 pandemic. We all are struggling, individually, community-wise, and organizationally to stay healthy, to cope, and understand how to move forward. As we look at our own companies, every organization has had to reset their plans to adjust to the new realities presented by this global health and economic crisis. In many ways, the pandemic has created an opportunity rich environment for us. Our customers, like us, are struggling to understand, to cope, to develop strategies to move forward. Their issues are less […]
What Do Our Customers Care About Now?
We are experiencing the mother of all “trigger events.” No company, no community, no region is immune to the health and economic challenges created by the pandemic. We all have a compelling mandate to change. We–our people, our own organizations, our customers, our suppliers, our communities–are being forced to adapt and change. As much as some will resist the need to change, perhaps waiting things out, hoping things will get back to “the way they were before,” change has become mandatory. Our customers are facing issues they have never faced and may not have the tools, knowledge or expertise to […]
Not So Social Social Media
Over the past 5 or so years, it seems a large number of people think social media and social platforms are the future of sales and marketing. We’ve seen platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter skyrocket in terms of utilization. We (or at least I) get deluged with connection requests, followed by the inevitable prospecting messages. Our news feeds are filled with self promotional “insights,” and articles, as the authors fight for likes and comments. When they can’t get enough, they put people’s names into the comments, so their material pops up in the feeds of the people they’ve hijacked. […]