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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
High Performance Selling, Putting The Pieces Together
Have you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle? Recently, I was sitting in a hotel lobby. The staff had put out one of those 1000 piece puzzles. It turned out to be a fascinating social experience–strangers were sitting down together, trying to place pieces in the right spots. It was huge fun! Puzzles are interesting, and they are an intriguing metaphor for sales. The pieces of the puzzle don’t make any sense by themselves. A single piece of the puzzle is meaningless, we don’t understand the picture, we don’t even know where/how it fits. But taken together, all the pieces […]
Sales Is Simple, Simple Isn’t Easy
Stripped of everything else sales is simple. At it’s core, sales is about: “Finding a person/company with a need, helping them solve it.” “Finding enough of these to achieve our business goals.” As with many complex things, we can express them in very simple terms. There is great beauty and simplicity in the expression of the laws of physics, a mathematical equation, in a great piece of art or music, in a great book. There is great elegance and insight in the ability to describe very complex things in ways that are very simple. But too often, we confuse simple […]
Looking For Answers In Different Places
This week, I had the privilege of sitting with some of the smartest people I know. We were talking about the challenges both sellers and buyers face in solving buyers’ problems. As we studied research, and shared ideas/experiences, there were some fascinating insights. There were ideas that could drive great increases in performance. But something troubled met about the discussion. To some degree, it was that feeling of “deja vu.” I’m involved in, literally, hundreds of these types of conversations every year. With clients, struggling to innovate and change, with thought leaders looking to introduce new approaches. We struggle in […]
Rethinking Time
While it’s trite, I have to start with some basic assumptions about time. Time is virtually the only thing each of us face, that is fixed or finite. Regardless how much we might wish or try, we cannot make more time. We can only think of how we reallocate what we do with time and how we use the time that we have. We seek to get the most out of each minute we have, wasting as little as possible (though “wasted time,” may actually be some of the most useful time, more later.) There are a number of ways […]
Coaching Has A Shelf Life
We are most effective in coaching when we are focused on an observable behavior. That is, “I observed you doing this….” “When this happens, you tend to do…” “What would happen if…..” Observable behaviors critical to effective coaching. They provide the context for the conversation. But observable behaviors have a shelf life, or use by date. We wait too long and they lose their impact, simply because both we and the person we are coaching may have cloudy memories of everything surrounding what we are talking about. Imagine the difference between these two scenarios: “Remember those calls you made a […]
Win Fast, Lose Faster
Losing fast, having the courage to walk away from a deal that you are highly unlikely to win is tough for everyone. But it’s actually one of the important things you can do to drive your sales performance. In the past 4 weeks, I’ve walked away from 2 deals. The first, I knew I could win. It was a very small deal, but the CEO was putting constraints around the project that were unreasonable, they hampered our ability to produce the results he expected. I couldn’t shift his opinions. Sure, I could have taken his money and delivered what he […]