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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
It’s Plan AND Execute!
It’s strategic planning season–at least for those companies on a fiscal calendar. For the past 2-3 months, I’ve been involved in working with a number of clients on their “strategic plans.” Usually, these are driven by the end of a fiscal year. People use the annual strategic planning process to drive major changes in what they want to do. It makes sense, we reset everything to zero at the beginning of the new fiscal year. It’s usually a great opportunity to look at major shifts in strategy, changes in what the organization is trying to do, and investments that need […]
It’s Not My Job To Teach You How To Prospect Me!
Before I start this post, I have a confession. I’m oddly drawn to really bad prospecting–particularly from companies selling tools or services to help sales people prospect. Perhaps it’s a deficiency in my character or something wrong in my upbringing, though Mom and Dad did the very best they could with the material they had. But I’m obsessed by really bad prospecting. Most people would see a bad email title, or read the first couple of sentences of a poorly constructed email and either trash or Spam it. I do that with the “normal” bad prospecting. You know the kind, […]
Being Interesting
Millions of people hours are spent every day confronting the issue, “How do we get our customers to be interested in us?” Marketing spends millions in content strategies, overlaid with all sorts of promotion programs. Sales looks for insights or provocation. Together, marketing and sales looks for provocative prospecting messages and approaches. In the escalating volume and noise of digital/social platforms, being provocative or even outrageous seems to rule. All focused on the concept of being interesting to our prospects and customers. In reality, being interesting isn’t that difficult. To be interesting, we have to be interested. We have to be […]
What Do Prospects Owe Sales People?
I had a fascinating exchange of emails with a very good sales person. He described a particularly difficult sales situation. It started well, then all of a sudden things fell apart. As he tried to recover or at least understand, there was a series of miscommunications, ending in the customer/prospect saying, “Don’t ever contact me or anyone in my company again.” The sales person had learned a lot in the process. He recognized that he had made some errors–all unintentional–but he could have handled the situation better. But I was struck by something at the end of the note, it […]
What Makes You Different?
What Makes You Different? It’s probably one of the most powerful questions in sales and for sales people. There are so many important dimensions to this question. Customers challenge us with that question. If we focus our differentiation on our products, solutions–too often, the only differentiation is our price. We have to find different answers to that question. Some years ago, Geoffrey Moore suggested that what makes you different wasn’t the product–but the total product or extended product offering. Things like customer service, quality, the power of the brand, our expertise, the reputation of the company. But again–there are lots […]
Coaching To Your Strengths Or Your Salesperson’s Weakness?
I was reminded in a great conversation with Bruce Lewolt of a problem all managers tend to face in coaching. We tend to coach to our strengths–not to the weaknesses of the sales person. It’s something that’s almost subconscious, but limiting to the individuals we are coaching, as well as overall organizational performance. We see it all the time. Recently, I was watching a sales manager coach one of her sales people. The manager was particularly strong on closing and negotiating. We had looked at the sales person’s pipeline. A lot of the deals seemed to be stuck. Despite all the […]