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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 Happy With Your Current…….”
Why do so many prospecting calls start with the questions, “Are you happy with…….?” Substitute whatever solution category you sell. It could be any variety of sales and marketing automation tools, your banking relationships, your website, your janitorial services. My answer is always, “I’m ecstatic with it!” After all, if I wasn’t happy and it was something important to me, I’d be doing something about it. But a huge number of prospecting calls start with this question. Inevitably, when I proclaim how satisfied I am, the sales person goes silent. The majority are stumped. They struggle with a few other […]
Don’t Confuse Leadership With Titles, Everyone Leads!
Too often, we look at a person’s title, CEO, EVP, SVP, C-Level something or other, Vice President, Director, Manager; confusing the title with leadership. In the best of all worlds people in executive or managerial roles would be great leaders. In reality, that’s not always true, sometimes in my most pessimistic moments, rarely true. We tend to mix the concepts of “manager” and “leader,” where they represent distinctly different behaviors, attitudes, and competencies. Jim Collins defines leadership characteristics of Level 5 leaders as including: Humility, will, ferocious resolve, the tendency to give others credit while assigning blame to themselves. Other […]
Why Don’t We Take The Time To Do Things Right?
It’s oddly ironic, we never seem to take the time to do things right. We don’t do the pre-call research before the call or meeting. We know we have the greatest impact when we have some minimal amount of research complete, but somehow, we don’t take the time. We don’t take the time to personalize our emails. We know we will have far higher open rates and far better receptivity with even the most simple levels of targeting and personalization, yet we don’t take the time to do it. We don’t leverage the sales process. We know the sales process […]
Organizations Are Reflections Of Leaders’ Priorities
I have lots of different conversations with sales executives. They cover any number of issues: “Dave, how do I get our people to use the sales process?” “My people aren’t using the tools we provide them….” “We need to be more customer focused….” “We need to create and communicate our value more effectively…..” “We need people to be more proactive in their territories….” The list goes on. All of them are about executives trying to drive change in the way their organizations and people work. They struggle with making these things happen. At some point in these conversations, I usually […]
Discussing The Role Of Sales Leadership In Driving Performance
Recently, I had the privilege of speaking to Noah Goldman on the Enterprise Sales Podcast about the importance of front line sales managers in maximizing the performance of their teams. Join Noah and I in this discussion as we cover a wide variety of things, including: How do we develop stronger and more diverse career paths for sales professionals? How we help our people achieve their goals, so that we can achieve our goals? The importance of “caring” as a sales leader? What’s different about Millennials? What’s critical for success as a front line sales leader? How should sales leaders maximize […]
Understanding Customer Needs
I was listening to a “discovery call.” It wasn’t much different than any other discovery call I’ve listened to. The sales person was asking the customer about their needs. As I listened to the questions, it struck me, the majority of the questions really weren’t about the customer’s needs but really about the product or solution. They went like this: What are you looking for in a [Insert whatever category you sell–e.g. Sales Automation, Marketing Automation, Financial Systems, Machine Tool, New Building] solution? What features and capabilities are important to you in that solution? And perhaps there was the drill […]