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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
Building Effective Marketing And Sales Strategies
I just read an outstanding article, How To Create An Effective Account-Based Sales Strategy In 5 Steps. It’s quite an excellent article, netting out the 5 Steps: Define your ideal company profile. Define your ideal buyer personas. Build a sales process to match each buyer journey. Provide content to match each stage for key personas. Measure, learn, improve. I finished this, applauding. I might have added some items around focusing on what the customer values and value creation, but I’m certain that is implied in the steps outlined in this article. But then I thought, aren’t these the steps of […]
Acting Beyond Ourselves, Having An Impact On Others
Long time followers of this blog will recognize this is the time of year when I will make a full court press on my audience to take action. It’s the time when I am blatantly asking you for your money! It’s not for me (I can hear the collective sighs of relief with people realizing I haven’t turned into a slimy sales person.) It’s for a very specific purpose: To provide clean water to those that don’t have it. It’s providing a donation–whatever you can afford–to Charity:Water. I believe each of us has a higher purpose. We need to think […]
New Logos, Account Development, Hunting
Recently, Don Mulhern and I were have a discussion about misunderstandings–consequently lost opportunities in prospecting, new account development, account growth. We know prospecting is critical for all sales people. If you are focused on new logos, you assess your territory, finding all the customers in your territory that have the problems your solutions solve. The sales person identifies these prospects, engages them, and hopefully converts enough to POs to achieve her goals. We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of sales people that are outstanding at hunting to find those new logos and companies, and close them. […]
If You’ve Ever Been Fired, I’ll Never Hire You!
There’s an article that’s getting a lot of attention, If You’ve Ever Been Fired, I’ll Never Hire You! It’s a commentary on a “manager’s” perspective that being “fired” is a black spot on anyone’s career and that manager taking the position that anyone who has been fired should never be considered for a job. Unfortunately, I think too many managers share that opinion. It’s an ill-informed opinion from many perspectives. There are all sorts of reasons, good or bad that a person is terminated. What we often miss about termination is that it is as much a fault of management […]
Failure Takes Effort
Failure, for the most part, doesn’t happen over night. Sure, there are catastrophic events, things far beyond our control. But I’m not talking about those. The failure I’m speaking of is systemic performance issues–perhaps not big when taken individually, but collectively cause us to fail. Stated another way, failure takes work, for the most part, it doesn’t just happen. We have to work at it to fail. Some of you are getting pissed off, you’re possibly offended, possibly confused, “What do you mean Dave?” Let me deconstruct it a little. Sure you can fail by not doing anything, but people […]
Leverage The Coaching “Multiplier Effect”
It seems to be a fact of current business life, all of us are time poor. We have more on our plates than we have time available to do them. We are distracted by the urgent, often at the expense of the important. For many managers, the coaching falls into that category. Many recognize that coaching is something they should be doing, but day to day fire-fighting and crisis management seem to conspire to rob managers of the time to coach. (Those that don’t recognize the importance of coaching, are a completely different case–one wonders if they should even be […]