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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
Do What Works, Don’t Do What Doesn’t!
Recently, I wrote, Predictable Revenue. It’s about sales process, in the article I made a statement which is suddenly making the rounds on social media. I said, “While the concept of the sales process is very simple—do what works, don’t do what doesn’t work, recognize the patterns for success, repeat, repeat, repeat.” The concept, Do What Works, Don’t Do What Doesn’t, really applies to everything we do. Some of you are getting pissed off, thinking “Dave you are stating the obvious, do you take us for idiots?” Well, no, but….. Too often I see organizations committed to doing what doesn’t […]
Optimizing Part Of The Selling Function, Sub-Optimizing The Whole
Recently. I read an article in which the position was put forth, “Inside sales does not have the responsibility for creating pipeline, only the responsibility for selling. They should never pick up the phone and make a prospecting call!” Many of you can imagine what my knee jerk reaction was to this statement. But for a moment, I managed to contain myself. The speaker was clearly smart and had been very successful in selling, perhaps there was something I misunderstood. As I got into the article, the question was posed, “Who is responsible for developing pipeline?” The response was, “Someone […]
Predictable Revenue
No, this post is not about Aaron Ross’ book, at least directly. It’s about the challenge each sales person and leader faces in achieving their sales goals. How do we create “Predictable Revenue?” This issue is at the core of most conversations I have with sales people. They are struggling to make their numbers, they face more competition, it’s more challenging to access customers, things seem to be tougher. These sales people are struggling, trying anything they can to find opportunities, qualify them, move them to closure. Often, it looks like “bumper cars,” at a carnival–events or circumstances push them […]
Understanding Our Customers’ Experiences
We’re doing some renovations in our home. These include changes in the Master Bedroom and Master Bath. As A result, my wife and I have temporarily moved to a guest room and are having to use a guest bath. It’s been interesting–and a little embarrassing — at least thinking of what we’ve put past guests through. There wasn’t anything glaringly bad about the guest bedroom and baths, just a whole series of little annoyances—bad lighting in one room, inconvenient switches and outlets in another, the bed was a little soft in another. In the shower, something was up with the […]
We Always Make An Impression!
There was an interesting comment in one of my latest rants, “God, Save Me From Clueless LinkedIn Prospecting.” The reader said, “At least he made an impression you will never forget.” He’s absolutely right! Every prospecting call or email, every interaction we have with a customer, everything we do makes an impression. The issue is, is it the impression we intended or want? Too often, we think we can disregard sloppiness or a poorly executed program. We skate through meetings being poorly prepared, thinking we can make it up in the next meeting. We are late to an appointment. We […]
The Greatest Disservice We Can Do To Our Customers, Waiting For Them To Buy!
There are just too many stupid conversations about the digitally savvy customer going on. Yes, we know customers are self educating, yes we know they are self diagnosing (that by itself is a frightening prospect), yes we know they don’t want to talk to sales people who simply parrot what they already find thought Google. We can know, expect, and encourage 100% of our customers to be self-educating. It frees sales people up to engage the customer in the conversations most important to them–helping them solve their problems. Whether that point at which they typically get sales people involved is […]