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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
Making Our Customers’ Lives Better
My article, How B2B Customers Make Decisions, sparked a lot of discussions in LinkedIn, Twitter, comments and emails. John N. (a good friend and client) raised an interesting question, “How do we get those lower level questions about how to make our customers’ work lives better?” It’s a great question! Truly understanding what makes each buyer tick, what their hot buttons are, their dreams and passions, what keeps them awake at night (I still think that’s a powerful concept), and so forth is really at the core of every sale. Customers tend to wrap business rationale around emotional/personal decisions. Part […]
Smart Marketers Acting Stupidly
Before I go any further, I know there are some detractors out there who will claim, “Smart Marketers,” is an oxymoron–something like military intelligence or sales professional (I tossed that in out of a sense of fair play.). But, for the most part, I meet a lot of very smart, well intended marketing people who, somehow do terribly stupid things. As a result, they invest in huge marketing programs, that not only fail to achieve the desired results, but have a negative impact on the perception of the brand or company. Right now, I’m looking at a series of emails, […]
On Being Coachable
In my post, Does Everyone Need Coaching, Anthony Iannarino made the comment, “If someone thinks they don’t need coaching, they probably need it the most!” Anthony’s probably right, but it brings up what I think is probably one of the most critical issues we face in coaching: Is The Person Coachable? I’m pretty hard nosed about this topic. There are people who simply aren’t coachable. They won’t listen, they aren’t open to different ideas, they don’t appreciate or think about feedback, they won’t engage in discussions about what they are doing and how they might improve. The problem with the […]
Does Everyone Need Coaching?
Participating in a webinar the other day, for a moment I was stumped by a question, “Does everyone need coaching?” I guess, more than being stumped, I was stunned with the question. But on reflection, it’s an important question, or at least one that many are confused about. To answer this, we have to look at the fundamental purpose of coaching. There’s a lot we can write about this, but briefly, the purpose of coaching is to help people continually learn, improve, and grow. We want them to perform at the highest levels in their current roles and to help […]
Sales Enablement Lab: How Frequently Do You Coach Your Sales People?
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a great discussion on coaching with Thierry van Herwijnen. Thierry had asked me to participate in his series of podcasts on his Sales Enablement Lab Site. The core topic of our conversation was on Coaching. We had a wide ranging discussion on how sales managers could integrate coaching into their daily activities, how to leverage reviews as powerful coaching opportunities, different approaches to coaching, and finding the time to coach. The original of this podcast can be found at Thierry’s site–along with a number of other outstanding interviews. […]
Looking In The Mirror
As sales and marketing professionals, we are supposed to help our customers identify new opportunities, improve their operations, solve problems. More and more, we are learning that our success with customers has less to do with what we sell, but more to do with how we engage them, how we help them identify new opportunities through providing insight, and how we help facilitate the buying process. In short, it’s how we help them identify the need to change and drive change in their own organizations. We constantly struggle in doing this, we invest millions in training, tools, programs, and so […]