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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
“Pissing On The Ashes”
A colleague had a wonderfully colorful term to describe situations we both found ourselves in. We were both senior executives in a large corporation. Often, we found ourselves on the phone with desperate sales people. A deal was about to close and they were worried about losing it. They were pulling out all the stops, trying to win the deal at the last moment. By that time they were so desperate, they would call on anyone for help–often it ended up being either Jerry or myself. Jerry called these, “Pissing on the ashes” calls. He likened it to a house […]
Rescuing Deals!
Each of us has experienced it, we’re struggling winning a deal. It’s an important one for us and for the company, we look for help from our managers and others. Instead of providing help, the managers sweeps in to save the day. They take the deal away, rescuing it, saving the day! Whether it’s a “Superman” complex, ego, or simply desperation, this practice is devastating. Usually, it doesn’t work. No amount of slick salesmanship can save a deal at the last moment, if we’ve made errors in the strategies we’ve executed and the work we have done with the customer. […]
Pick Up The Damn Phone!
Unconsciously, I’ve fallen into a terrible trap, all of it has been a result of trying to maximize my efficiency, managing my time more effectively. I’ve started to rely on email, texting, DMs in Twitter and all sorts of other tools as the primary mechanism to engage with clients, colleagues, and people in the community. It’s terribly convenient and very efficient. I can group my communications to times convenient for me. Since I only do email about 3 times a day, I only do twitter twice a day, I can block and schedule the time to interact and engage in […]
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 […]