Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
How Good Are “Best Practices?”
Thousands of blogs, books, articles, video’s, and podcasts talk about “best practices.” They cover every topic imaginable. Every nuance of marketing, sales, customer experience, business, dating (oops) talk about best practices. As consumers of information about how to improve, we devour best practices. The thought is, “If I know what’s best practice, and apply it in my organization, we will be doing the very best things we can be doing and should see huge performance improvements.” The problem with best practices are that they are only “best” in a specific context. That is, what is best for others, may not […]
We Have “Customer Intelligence,” But Little Intelligent Selling/Marketing
I’m sorry for whining, perhaps I got up on the wrong side of the bed. Lately, I’ve been inundated with discussions on Customer Intelligence. PR folks are blindly sending me announcements from providers of Customer Intelligence solutions–though it seems they’ve applied no customer or any other intelligence in their outreach. I’m deluged, every day, with emails and phone calls from sales people wanting to sell me Customer Intelligence solutions. Though, it’s hard to understand how, if those solutions were used in targeting me, I might be a prospect. We have long had tools that provide varying capabilities of customer intelligence. […]
Prisoners Of Our Own Experience
Recently, I had separate discussions with two very good sales executives. Each was taking a very strong position on particular aspects of selling. As the discussions progressed, I could see their perspectives were limited by their experience. One was talking about how to drive decision-making on deals. He was taking a position, “This is the way everything gets done. If you aren’t doing this, you will fail!” I pushed him on his statements, “What causes you to reach these conclusions?” He responded, “Every company I’ve worked for, every deal I have worked on fits this pattern. It’s what I’ve learned […]
On C-Level Buying
As sales people, we learn that we are to call high. We should be reaching the top executives in the corporation. We believe if only we could reach these individuals, we can wear them down or convince them to buy what we are selling. Often, we are so focused on reaching that exalted level, we neglect important people at lower levels. We, sometimes, believe that regardless of the decision a buying group might make, we can influence the C-Level to reverse unfavorable decisions. But too often, we get C-Level Buying wrong. Don’t get me wrong, C-Level executives can be very […]
What Does It Mean To Be “Authentic”
I was recently have a discussion with someone. It spanned some comments on LinkedIn and private discussions by email. I had reacted to something he had posted, suggesting that while his premise was very good in many circumstances, that there might be a number where very different approaches might be applied. We wandered in the conversation, he kept presenting data to support his argument, me responding, “Yes, and there is more….” At one point, perhaps out of frustration, he said: “It’s really important to note I share my experience vs. it’s always this way in every case – I give […]
Does Being On Commission Make You Untrustworthy?
I read a discussion between some wickedly smart people. One person took a position that one could not be a “Trusted Advisor,” and be on commission. He later extended the argument to include being accountable for achieving a quota compromised the ability of the sales person to be trusted. To be fair, there are people and organizations that are driven purely by self interest. They structure everything they do around maximizing the return they get, regardless the impact to the people they deal with, including customers. We have movies like Glengary, Glen Ross, Boiler-room, The Wolf Of Wall Street that […]