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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
Starting At “Zero,” Again…..
Sales is about the only profession, where each fiscal year, we have the opportunity to start at zero. What we have done in the past year, good or bad, is past. We all have a clean slate to start all over again. As we look at this clean slate, we have an opportunity. We can continue to do the same things we have always done, replaying past years over and over, probably producing similar results. Or we can consider this a fresh start. We can reassess what we have done, what we need to do. We can look at what […]
Zero-Based Sales Planning
As we start a new year, perhaps your plans are locked in. But perhaps there is an opportunity to rethink or, even to reinvent what we think about the sales function and how we sell. So much of what we do is done just because, “That’s the way we’ve always done things.” We think we may have evolved, but in reality we’ve just applied a layer of technology and updated language and jargon. For example rather than being customer focused and consultative, we are insight driven. But fundamentally, we are doing the things we have always done, but perhaps at […]
On Consistency
I don’t know why, but we never talk about consistency. Consistency is about what we do every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Consistency is a key foundation for learning and improvement. We can’t develop new skills unless we apply them day after day, week after week….. Somehow consistency seems to be anathema to how we work and behave. We are event driven. We have the new program, we try it out for a few days or weeks, until we are bored (Ironically, we do this even for things that work). Then we […]
What We Think Of Our Customers Colors Our Engagement
Someone called seeking coaching on a specific deal. He had fallen into traps which blinded him in moving forward with a winning strategy. He started the conversation with, “The key decisionmaker is really a jerk! He’s power hungry, his people want to do something with us, they’ve presented compelling arguments, but he doesn’t want to go forward……. They are losing so much opportunity, if they only they would implement our system……” A few moments later in the conversation, I learned, “…..He’s relatively new in his role, he’s turning everything upside down, his past experience is with our competitor, so he’s […]
“10 Years Of Experience…..”
I spend a fair amount of time helping clients hire managers and sale people. Usually, I’m in the final round of interviews. I look at their CV’s and LinkedIn profiles. Usually, they are talking about their years of experience in selling. “I’ve been selling complex solutions for 10, 15, 20…..years.” As I look at their job histories, I see tenures of 1-2 years, every once in a while maybe they become “old timers” with 3 years in the same role. You can probably guess what I’m going to say, but I have to say it. As I look at their […]
The “Real Cost” Of A Salesperson
What would you think of a front line manufacturing manager failing to address problems that consistently cost millions of dollars in scrap and rework (not to mention customer sat problems because of missed deliveries)? Or an engineering manager that missed product launches that caused millions in lost revenue? Most people would say these are real problems and if they happened repeatedly, these managers would be fired! Yet, within sales, this practice is common, yet people, that is leaders seem not to care about it, instead the squander millions in mis-hires or in failing to retain top talent. Stated differently, I’ve […]