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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
Are You Creating Deep Interactions?
Read any research report, engagement is becoming a top challenge with every organization. Employees don’t feel engaged. Customers don’t see their sales people engaging them in meaningful ways. Engagement, or rather disengagement is becoming a crisis in our businesses and in our ability to reach customers. Unfortunately, there seem to be many things that conspire to drive further disengagement. Our devices, apps, and tools; things that are supposed to be helping us be more productive cause us to be distracted, consequently disengaged. Think to any meeting you’ve participated in the past 2 days. Probably you and others were listening with […]
Is The Concept Of Hunters And Farmers Relevant Any More?
It seems like the concept of hunters and farmers have been around virtually as long as sales. In theory, hunters are the people that have to prospect, to bring in new accounts or logos. The farmers, according to mythology nurture those accounts, retaining the business, possibly growing to drive more revenue. In much of the literature, there’s a lot of jockeying and ego about which is the “real” sales job. Frankly, I think these categorizations aren’t useful–if they ever have been. The sales person’s job is to maximize the share of account or territory for which they are responsible. I […]
Sales Management–Pragmatic Selfishness
Yes, you’ve seen these discussion before. Classically, our org charts look something like pyramids. It’s human nature for us to think about career progression moving up the food chain. Perhaps it’s ambition, perhaps it’s ego, but many seem to capture their self worth in statements like, “I have thousands of people working for me…….” This classic hierarchical approach with the implicit idea of the power managers have over subordinates no longer works (if it ever did). We can no longer expect to tell our people what they need to be doing and expect them to immediately comply. Then there’s the […]
Are Your Sales Metrics Aligned With Your Business Strategy?
Not long ago, I spoke with a frustrated CEO. His company was doing OK, but somehow not meeting his expectations . Like many companies, thee customers needs were changing quite profoundly. They were rapidly shifting their solution offerings to match customer needs and to compete. They were investing in new areas, had launched some products to expand the value they could bring to their target customers. But the product sales weren’t taking off as he had expected. The CEO felt that shifting focus to many of the new products was critical to their future success. He believed, over time, reliance […]
There’s A Reason Gyms Don’t Hire Morbidly Obese Trainers
We’ve exited the Holiday Season in the US. Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, the New Year are all past, we are anxiously setting goals for the New Year. We’ve probably overindulged, we have the guilt feelings and decide to go back to the gym, maybe hire a personal trainer. Imagine walking into the gym, looking for a personal trainer. There are two to select from. One’s morbidly obese. He’s planted in a chair–possibly two, he struggles to stand, huffs and puffs to walk you around the gym, can’t demonstrate any of the exercises you should be doing. He starts wheezing, cuts […]
Crossing The Chasm: What We Care About Versus What Our Customers Care About
There is a huge chasm between customers and our own sales and marketing initiatives. This is nothing new, yet it’s what keeps us from connecting with our customers and prospects. It’s what causes our customers and prospects to shut down, ignoring our best efforts to engage them and sell them something (you can begin to see the challenge with that statement.). The problem is pretty natural, but it keeps us apart. Simply stated, we care about what we care about and our customers care about what they care about. Until those are aligned, until they are the same, there is […]