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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
Is Cold Calling Dead?
In reality, this title is just clickbait. It’s certain to draw all sorts of attention with pundits on either side of the issue. Inevitably each shaping their “pro” or “con” arguments based on what they are trying to sell. And every time we get into this discussion, we immediately dive in taking and defending positions without even defining terms to make sure we are talking about the same thing. Before we can even answer the question and have a reasonable debate, we have to define, “What is cold calling?” If we think of cold calling as: Unprepared, random calls to […]
The Importance Of Hustle!
Hustle is both an important concept but a very unfortunate word. To many, particularly prospects and customers, it has vey negative connotations. Prospects and customers don’t want to feel “Hustled.” Usually they take this meaning as being manipulated, cheated, or fooled. Sales people who do this are often labeled “Hustlers.” But there is an important, positive aspect of Hustle or Hustling. It’s really a sense of obsessive and relentless focus and goal attainment. That’s where a lot of sales people (and managers) get Hustle wrong. They confuse Hustle with activity and busyness. They seem to think hustle is about volume […]
Who Owns The Customer Relationship?
We often talk about relationships in sales, saying relationships matter. There are all sorts of phrases like, “people buy from people,” which ascribe the importance of building relationships with our customers. Yet, it seems that too much of how we actually manage the customer engagement life cycle seems to ignore the importance of developing relationships with our customers. Instead, we focus on our efficiency in handling the customer. It almost seems that we have an assembly line that we pass our customers along—we try to attract attention, building a relationship through our digital presence–web sites, blogs, other materials. We complement […]
Are Sales People Inherently Lazy?
Often, I read and hear, “Sales people are inherently lazy…..” Perhaps, I’m looking at the world through rose-colored glasses, but I believe most sales people want to do the right things. The problem is, too often, they just don’t know what the right things are. It’s hard to be lazy and be successful in selling, after all, selling is one of the toughest professions in business. Sales people face more “no’s” than “yes’s” everyday. They have to constantly focus on finding new deals, developing new relationships, working on current deals, coordinating resources both within their own companies and with their […]
On Personal Branding
I’m amused by all the articles and talk about personal branding. But, it’s always fashionable to develop new names for age-old concepts. To be fair, sometimes these label shifts bring these principles back to our attention. To some degree, the concepts of personal branding and reputation are–or should be—synonymous. I’m not sure in much of modern personal branding, they are. It seems much of the discussion focuses on building visibility and building broad networks. The trick in sustaining your personal brand isn’t in how big your network is or how visible you are, but rather in delivering on your brand […]
The Customer Doesn’t Care About Your Number!
It happens to all of us. We need to make our number. Quarter end is approaching, we need a deal to close to make our numbers. Recently, I was doing a deal review with a sales person needing a specific deal to make her quarter happen. She’s a great sales person, and as with great sales people very goal driven. We started the deal review with her statement, “I need to make this deal happen this quarter….” Naturally, her manager and I agreed. But as we did the deal review, the focus on her needs became really distracting. All the […]