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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
Automating Sales Coaching
The sales automation suppliers are catching onto the idea of leveraging technology for sales coaching. I’m not a complete dinosaur, I think there is a huge place to leverage technology to complement coaching by managers. However, I worry about some of the approaches being promoted displacing the person to person interaction and the real value of coaching. The power of effective coaching is the power of the learning conversation. The ability to explore, in real-time, the ability to leverage the situation and context to help the sales person think, learn, and grow. In some sense, it’s the power of open-ended […]
The Faces Of Our Customers
Recently, I’ve been trying something new when I meet with clients. I ask, “When was the last time you visited your customers–in a non sales situation? When did you actually see what they do, how they use your solutions? What have you done to get to know them better? Unfortunately, the responses aren’t surprising. Many have never actually visited a customer. If course they’ve met them at trade shows and industry events, they may have spoken to them on the phone. They’ve had email or social exchanges with customers. But too often, the “customer” has become an abstraction. The customer […]
CXO’s—It’s Getting Crowded At The “CEO’s Table”
Nearly every day, I read of a new CXO title. The latest is Chief Resilience Officer–though I suspect the person’s tongue was deeply planted in his cheek. It seems everyone. There used to be such simple titles, like VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, VP of Procurement, and on and on and on. The CFO title seems to have been around for some time–at least as long as I’ve been working (which is a fair amount of time). But in recent years, there’s a rush to CXO titles and to getting a “seat at the CEO’s table.” It strikes me […]
Customers Are Choosing How To Invest Their Time, Is Investing In You Their Best Investment?
The reality of our professional, business, (perhaps our personal lives), is that we are time poor. Everyone is over-committed, overworked, and overwhelmed. Time becomes their most precious and unrecoverable commodity. With this as the glaring reality of our own time utilization and that of our customers, I’m astounded at how cavalier we are about how we use time. From a customer point of view, research report after research report comes back with one of the top issues customers have about sales people: “They waste my time!” Every sales person I talk to, the number one problem is, “I can’t get […]
Show Your Customers That You Care
Everything we read about customers and their attitudes about sales people is pretty negative. Customers do everything they can to avoid sales people until the very last moment. To most customer, 600 sales people trapped in a downed plane on the ocean floor is simply a good start. When one looks at the orientation and focus of most sales and marketing programs, it’s no wonder customers feel that way. From the very initiation of a relationship, it’s all about the sales person, their company, their products. Think about it, from our very first interactions we aren’t demonstrating that we care, […]
Prospecting, How Much Pre Call Research?
How much pre-call research do you need to do to be effective in your prospecting? Frankly, it’s a really loaded question, with answers all over the place. Some argue you need to research deeply, learning as much as you can about the company and the individual as possible, becoming well informed about them and their business so you can be relevant in the conversation. I’ve always tended to default to this answer–but it’s largely driven by my target prospects, which tend to be C-Level Executives of very large corporations. It’s hard to reach them, so I want to make sure […]