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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 — June 25, 2016
A few updates you may find interesting to peruse over the weekend. What I’m Learning: I’m in the middle of an outstanding course entitled: Model Thinking on Coursera. It’s taught by Scott Page of the University of Michigan. It’s a fascinating course. I think every sales professional should look at courses on models and systems thinking. Not only do they help us makes sense of our own complex work environments, they provide us critical thinking and problem solving skills to help our customers. Movies You Should See: Just saw The Music Of Strangers. It follows Yo-Yo Ma and members of […]
Sales Leadership Dysfunctions — Sales Managers As Desk Jockeys
I’ve written about a couple of dysfunctions—Anti Sales Attitudes and the Need For Clarity and Direction. One of the more common dysfunctions is sales managers leading from behind a desk. Increasingly we find sales managers either trapped behind or hiding behind a desk. It comes about in a number of ways. Often organizations become increasingly bureaucratic and process bound. There are endless reports (odd when many of the tools are supposed to save us time on reporting) and urgent internal meetings requiring sales management participation. Some of this reporting is necessary. It’s important to other people in the organization to […]
Jeb Blount On The Sales Manager Survival Guide
Thanks to Jeb Blount of Sales Gravy for this great explanation of Sales Manager Survival Guide.
Speed Kills!
No, I haven’t become the spokesperson for the National Highway Safety Commission, I’ve had more than my fair share of speeding tickets (and actually far fewer than I deserve.) I just read a horrible piece of advice from a “guru.” The advice was, “Efficiency Drives Effectiveness!” How wrong can a supposed expert be? Efficiency is all about speed, getting more done in less time. We have to be concerned about efficiency, but only if we are doing the right things in the right way with the right people at the right time! Executing bad selling skills very efficiently produces garbage really quickly. […]
Your Coaching Discussions Always Have A Context
A few days ago, I had a great discussion with a reader who had just finished reading the Sales Manager Survival Guide. He’s a senior sales executive who wanted to immediately start applying some of the lessons in coaching the managers reporting to him and to improve their abilities in coaching their people. He had started with the development of a template of questions that he wanted to ask people. It was a great template, he was artfully applying the non-directive questions I cover in Chapter 12 (How Do You Coach). As we discussed the questions, we talked about the […]
What’s The Most Important Customer Question Sales People Probably Can’t Answer?
We equip our sales teams with the ability to answer any question customers might have about our products and services. Sales people, can go on forever about features, functions, feeds, and speeds for each of the products they sell. They sometimes can present feature – benefits, for example, “improved productivity, reduced cost,” and so forth. But the capabilities of our products and how wonderful they are, are probably not the most important things in our customers minds. We know this qualitatively and quantitatively by the disinterest customers have in our marketing and prospecting programs touting our products. Open rates, click […]