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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
Get Smart, Do Good!
I’ve been obsessing about this date, May 24, 2016 for some months. It is the target date we established for the launch of Sales Manager Survival Guide. We’ve made it, for some of you who’ve visited Amazon, we actually made it several days ago! This is an unusual post, my sole objective is to get you to BUY! I have two fundamental reasons to ask that you BUY, particularly in the next couple of days. My reasons, however, aren’t to “get the order,” so I hit the sales goals the team established. Long time readers of this blog know that […]
The Toughest Job In Sales
Sales is tough. Probably each person reading this thinks their job is the toughest. If you are a sales person, you’ve got to hit your numbers. You’re out there trying to find enough opportunities, you need to work those opportunities through the pipeline, getting enough to make quota. If you are a SDR, it’s taking those leads, reaching out to people, most of whom, probably don’t want to talk to you. You have to sort through the literature collectors, tire kickers, until you find the right ones to qualify and pass on . As the top sales executive, you have […]
Doing The Deal Or Solving The Problem
I wrote Solving Our Customers’ Problems several days ago. My friend Martin Schmalenbach, of Microchip Technology, wrote a long comment about his real world experiences as a customer of sales training and sales enablement solutions. The comment provided such a vivid description of the customer perspective and his reactions to several very different approaches to earning his business. I asked Martin’s permission to publish his story here: We’ve just completed another sales boot camp here at Microchip – 64 Field folk from all over the world, here at our corporate HQ for 2 weeks of an experience (rather than training) […]
Should Sales Managers Coach?
Perusing my news feeds this morning, an article entitled, “Should Sales Managers Coach” caught my eye. My knee jerk reaction was , “Duugggh, isn’t the answer obvious?” However, I respect the author and decided to read the article to understand the point of view (or perhaps it was one of the provocative titles to get someone to read). I reread the article 5 times. I think the author’s conclusion is “Yes, but……” Upon reflection, I think perhaps the points of view addressed in the article are more indicative of the confusion we have about the sales manager’s job. Is it […]
Solving Our Customers’ Problems
At its essence, sales is about finding customers who have problems we can solve, helping them understand why they should solve the problem, helping them commit to that change, and helping them solve the problem. We wrap a lot of stuff about prospecting, qualifying, deal strategies, pipelines, call planning, presenting, proposing, value propositions, objection handling, closing, negotiating around this process. We spend billions training people in those skills. We spend further billions providing tools to help sales people more efficiently execute those things. But somehow something is missing. Before I talk about what’s missing, it’s reasonable to challenge me saying, […]
Surrendering Your Business Strategy To Your Sales People
Do you want your sales people defining your business strategy? As good as they are, do you really want your brand new SDR’s, or your account managers, or even your very top performers defining your business customer and growth strategy? Do you want your bottom performers doing the same? I don’t think any top business executive or sales executive wants the sales people to be setting the strategic direction and growth priorities for the organization, yet too often, by lack of attention, poor direction, or simple omission, that’s what happens. Sales people want to be successful. They are hungry to […]