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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
We Become Commoditized Only When We Let Ourselves Be Commoditized!
I read an article about the seeming inevitability of commoditization. We certainly see a lot of evidence of more of what we sell becoming commodities. In most of our lifetimes, we’ve seen things like PC’s, Smart Phones, and other things become commodities. They are largely undifferentiated, leading people to buy on price. The trend toward commoditization paints a dire picture for our companies and sales people. Margins decline, profitability declines, our abilities to innovate and produce new products are hampered, and selling becomes an issue of pricing–and it’s probably more efficient to do this through electronic trading systems. Possibly, a […]
Would You Trash A Multi Million Investment After 18-22 months.
Imagine you are investing in a fantastic sales automation tool. It’s a multimillion dollar investment. It takes some time to implement the system and get it fully productive, perhaps 7 months to a year, depending on the complexity of your operations. Once it’s in production, it drives the results you expect. But after 18-22 months, you decide to abandon it, you decide to go through the same process again, with the same levels of investment with a new sales automation tool. Most of us would consider that insanity! Why would anyone invest multimillions, go through a long implementation process, start […]
Everything Has Changed In Buying/Selling, Except Us!
Reflect back on your career in sales. For some of you, it’s only a few years, for some it goes back a couple of decades. Regardless how long you have been involved in selling, things have changed in enormous ways. Much of what we do has changed. We used to be the gateway to information about products and services. Customers met with us to learn about new products, capabilities and services. Now they self educate through the web. They no longer need us to educate them about our products. Buying has changed, the customer is definitely in charge (I think […]
Account Management, The Challenges Of Incumbency
Account Based Everything is a huge topic these days. Everyone is account focused, they want to grow their relationships, increase penetration and grow revenue. Developing our accounts is a huge opportunity. There’s huge amounts of data outlining the differences in sales time and cost between growing an existing relationship and acquiring net new logos. Growing our existing accounts is a hands down winner! Intuitively, it makes sense to leverage our current accounts. We know them, they know us. We can leverage our existing position to grow the relationship. We have a bit of an “insider” or incumbency advantage with these […]
Sales Success Starts With Your Mindset
There are all sorts of books and articles that talk about the attributes of high performance sales people or high performance teams. There are statistics, data points, research, that identify all sorts of characteristics: Aptitude, comfort in talking about money, ability to handle rejection, listening skills, self discipline, time management capability, industry knowledge, market knowledge, competitiveness, goal orientation….. The lists go on and on and on. All valid, all helpful, but somehow something is missing. It was a conversation with Mitch Little and Hendre Coetzee that created the “Aha” moment for me. Sales success, whether individual or organizational is simply […]
The Power Of Time Blocking
In a conversation with a sales manager, he was struggling with the performance of his people. They were making their numbers–kinda/sortof–it was actually spotty, some months were great, some months were awful, everything evened out over time. The challenge was, a lack of consistency within the team and from month to month. We started talking about activity levels. He said the people always seemed to be busy. I asked, “What are they doing?” He really didn’t know, but had a general impression of “busyness.” Fortunately they had a shared calendar system. I asked him to show me the calendars for […]