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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
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 […]
Bad Advice: Focus Your Coaching On Your Top Performers!
I just read some really bad advice from a really smart individual, “Managers spend too much time on their bottom performers, they need to focus on their top and middle performers.” The explanation went on that time invested in bottom performers wouldn’t result in substantive performance improvement, the equivalent time spent with our top performers produces more results. On the surface this makes sense, it’s easy to jump on that bandwagon. But in reality, it’s actually pretty bad advice. Before diving into this, I do have to admit, I’m probably taking a lot of what this individual was saying, out […]
Leadership And Empathy
Surprisingly, one of the characteristics I see too many managers lacking is empathy. One would think otherwise, after all, most sales managers have been sales people at some point in their career. We would think these managers would have deep understanding of the challenges sales people face every day. Perhaps there’s a switch, of some sort, that causes individuals to forget what it means to sell in today’s environment. Perhaps it’s the seduction of sitting behind a screen, pouring through endless amounts of data, trying to find the magic answer to driving sales performance (the answers aren’t there–stop looking, though […]
Think It’s Hard To Sell, It’s Harder To Buy!
One of my biggest weaknesses is my impatience. I do all sorts of things to control it, or at least mask it. I sit on my hands, bite my tongue, count to 1000 then start over again. Sometimes it’s a losing battle with myself. Recently, I was sitting with a group of sales people. It was a pretty large group of all different ages. One person started talking about how difficult it is to sell. Everyone piled on, whining about the difficulties they faced (you can see me betraying my impatience with the choice of words). The complaints were the […]
Trust, Your Commission Plan, Making Money
I’m ashamed to admit it, every once in a while I get sucked into mind numbing discussions on LinkedIn. This one was posed by an individual pretending to want to become a “trusted advisor” to his customers. He posed a scenario, “I can propose A to my customer and this is my commission. If I propose B to my customer, my commission is more. B is a better solution, but I’m afraid my customer will think I’m being deceptive since I’m getting paid more for it….” The conversation devolved, for the most part, from there with people discussing various alternatives, […]