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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
Bits and Pieces — July 30, 2016
It’s been a while since I’ve published this random collection of thoughts. Here are a few things that I think are worth checking out: Continuous Learning: In the last Bits and Pieces, I mentioned I was taking the Coursera course on Model Thinking. I’ve gone on to enroll in Design Thinking For Innovation. Developing models and frameworks is critical for all sales and business professionals. As the complexity of our work, our organizations, and our customers skyrockets, we need models and frameworks to help us understand things, to help us evaluate how to most effectively achieve our goals, to help […]
Putting Aside Our Agenda For The Customer’s
Gary Peyrot asked a great question recently, He had read, “What Would Happen If We Saw Things The Way Our Customers Saw them?“ He ask, “How to you approach the solution from the customer’s point of view, ……do you need to purposefully put aside your own agenda?” It’s a question that actually hits to the root of the challenge every sales person faces. We’re driven by our goals and objectives. We have the responsibility for generating revenues for our company–selling products and solutions. But I think many sales people are conflicted when we talk about not focusing on your products […]
Micromanagers Don’t Trust Themselves
Somehow I get involved in lots of conversations about micromanaging. These conversations always have the same pattern. It’s an individual contributor talking about their manager, or a manager talking about a more senior manager—it goes all the way up the food chain, I recently heard of a CEO of a multi-billion organization approving every request for travel and expenditures over $100. The people are complaining—“It takes so much of my time; I can’t do anything without needing to ask them about it first; I have to report everything I do to them……” The diatribes usually end in some variant of, […]
Personas, Profiles, Relevance, Personalization, And Targeting–Stop Wasting Your Time
I tend to look to the approaches sales and marketing experts and automation suppliers as representative of preferred and best practices in sales and marketing. After all, they are the experts in driving effective, efficient, and impactful engagement with prospects and customers. It seems one would be well served by understanding what these people do as “best practices” in representing their own products and services, then adapting them to our own approaches to prospecting, engaging, and connecting with our customers. I do have to admit some confusion. Too often, the expert approaches they use in trying to engage their customers, […]
Sales Leadership Dysfunction — Dysfunctional Compensation Plans
My last post inn this series was “Super Hero Sales Managers.” I hesitated for a moment discussing this topic–sales compensation plans. In many ways, it’s a No-Win discussion. I can barely scratch the surface on this topic, sales people, sales executives, and non sales executives invovled in compensation are likely to be unhappy. Any time we talk about money, someone is likely to be unhappy, there will always be people on each side of the argument with persuasive arguments for their point of view–even if the argument is an “entitlement” argument. Since this series focuses on sales leadership, I’ll focus […]
Your Customers Have Problems, But Do They Know?
Not long ago, I got a call from a frustrated sales person. He had a huge opportunity with a customer, but just couldn’t get traction. He reviewed things with me. “I’ve been talking to them about our solutions. They seem to be interested, but they just aren’t moving forward the way they should. I’m really upset, they have so many problems that our solution fixes, but I just can’t get them to move forward.” He went on to review the problems. He had done a pretty good job of research. The issues seemed compelling, the sales person had done a […]