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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
Send Your Customer Your Call Plan!
You do have a written call plan for every meeting, don’t you? Have you ever considered sending it (or a version of it) to the customer in advance? Now I know what you are thinking. “Dave has some crazy ideas, but he’s really gone off the deep end on this.” When I speak to groups of sales people about this, the response that always comes up is, “Well, if I do this, then my customer will know what I’m trying to accomplish!” My response is, “Well isn’t that the point? Don’t you want the customer to be as prepared as you […]
Manager, If You’re Doing Deals, You’re Not Doing Your Job
All sales professionals revel in doing deals. There’s an adrenaline rush working on a complex deal and making it happen. There’s the sense of attainment and accomplishment in winning a hard fought competition. There’s that momentary celebration, high-five’s, before we move on to the next. But as managers, as great as that feeling is, if we are spending the majority of our time doing deals, then we aren’t doing our jobs. (The corollary, is if your sales people aren’t doing deals, then they aren’t doing their jobs.) When we moved from being individual contributors to being leaders and managers, our […]
7 People In 10 Years!
Recently, I had an email exchange with a friend. He was seeking advice about his current role. As he described his situation, I stopped him at the sentence, “I’m the 7th person in 10 years to hold this job.” Without knowing anything more, the problem–at least the primary problem–had nothing to do with him (or probably his predecessors). It is a management problem — or rather a mismanagement problem! Let’s run the math and think about the implications of this. 7 people in 10 years means average tenure of 17 months. Research data shows onboarding generally takes 10 months (in […]
Leadership Is About Personal Responsibility And Action
Forgive me, I’m on a bit of a rant. Those who have followed me for some time know I get off on tangents, sometimes writing these articles to deal with frustration and sort out my own thinking. In this specific article, I also have to recognize, I will probably hurt the feelings of a well intended follower–but frankly, I don’t really care. I am not targeting that individual. (Doesn’t an opening paragraph of apologies and disclaimers make you really curious?) This morning I got an email from a very well intended follower. It was titled, “A Word Of Caution.” The text read, “Hi Dave-You […]
Being Too Smart About Our Solutions
Not long ago, I had a fascinating call with a sales person. He was very knowledgeable about the issues and challenges customers in his target segments faced. Turns out, he had spent much of his career in “operational roles” in his target markets. Stated differently, he had held the same jobs and faced the same issues as the people he now called on. This experience gave him great perspective into the issues his customer faced. It also enabled him to be very articulate about the value of his solutions. But as we discussed the deal, I got more and more […]
The “Competitor” Question
It happened again this morning. I was doing a review with a sales person. It was a very important call, we were discussing the customers’ attitudes, views, priorities, and so forth. I asked, what competition are they looking at, what do they think of them? There was a momentary pause on the phone. The sales person responded, “I think they are looking at competition, but I’m not sure……” He went on, “….I’m really afraid of planting the idea in their heads or of bringing it up…..” I actually hear this too often. Sales people dance around the competition issue. They […]