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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
The Eroding Distinction Between Inside And Field Sales
There’s a lot written about the shift from field sales to inside sales. It makes sense–but I wonder is there really much of a distinction between inside and outside sales. Perhaps our notions of inside and outside sales are outdated and we might be better served just focusing on sales. In the “old days,” there were clear distinctions between inside and outside sales. I started my career a field or outside sales person. We were expected to be out of the office calling on customers, in fact for a while we were fined if we were in the office during business […]
Your Channel Partners Aren’t The Enemy!
Few organizations have the ability to reach every possible customers themselves. They can’t afford to hire enough sales people to cover the markets, they don’t have enough deep expertise in certain markets, they need to collaborate with others to provide a complete solution to their customers. Most organizations have found they need to leverage some form of partner or channel to reach all the potential customers, maximizing their ability to sell and grow. These partners come in all shapes and sizes–they may be strategic technology partners, they may be resellers, systems integrators, distributors, VAR’s, VAD’s, manufacturer’s reps, agencies, outsourced sales […]
Bad Selling Fundamentals = Bad Social Selling!
Social Selling is the “Easy Button” for every sales person’s dreams of making quota. At least if you believe 75% of what’s written about Social Selling, all you have to do is leverage LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter Piinterest or whatever your favorite social selling platform is–and you will be successful in sales. Make connections, have a great profile, comment on articles, build your network, reach out and engage. Do this and opportunities will come flying on the door! Interestingly, I’m now starting to see some articles from people who leverage social channels very effectively. They are saying this dream of effortless selling […]
A Rose By Any Other Name……..
Actually, the full context of this phrase comes from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2, Juliet says: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose… By any other name would still smell as sweet…” It turns out that roses aren’t roses aren’t roses. At last count, there were 150 species of rose and thousands of hybrids. As a result, roses are quite different and distinctive. The other day I was speaking with a manager. He was quite anxious to recruit sales people and had come up with a source of pre-trained, experienced sales people. His thought was […]
The High Cost Of Distraction
No this isn’t a post on the evils of texting or reading emails while driving—though the costs of those distractions are devastating. This is focuses on all the tools, alerts, and things that are supposed to help us, yet in fact have devastating impacts on our personal effectiveness and productivity. We can point out endless examples—people reading their smartphones during a meeting, the person you are meeting with is a devout believer in multitasking. And then there are the distracted, “Ugh-huh’s, that sounds fantastic,” responses to my wife as she tells me about her day while I’m looking at the […]
When Things Dry Up!
Marketing has been developing fantastic content. They are leveraging every analytic tool imaginable, they’ve got marketing automation tools, they’re active on social channels, doing everything possible to generate demand. Sales people wait for the coveted SQL–the Sales Qualified Lead. Regardless of what’s been agreed between marketing and sales, to a sales person the SQL is a buying ready (hopefully PO ready) lead. The customer is interested, they want to talk to sales–in fact they were probably on the verge of calling sales themselves. In an ideal world, every sales person has the right flow of SQL to keep healthy pipelines, […]