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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 “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 […]
“TWAM” Is A Terrible Social Engagement Strategy!
Over the past years, but particularly over the past couple of months, the level of TWAM has been escalating. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s my terminology for Twitter Spam (Mind you, I’ve applied for trademark rights for TWAM 😉 This week, I’ve been personally subjected to it at least half a dozen times a day. This new form of TWAM not done by professional TWAMMER’s. Those are the people inundating you with messages promising 100K follower, or other useless stuff. These are sales, marketing and others who are using social media terribly–discrediting themselves and the brand […]
“I Want To Follow-Up Our Earlier Conversations…..”
I feel obligated to put a disclaimor on my behavior at the beginning of this post. I sincerely try to be a good prospect when being prospected. It’s very difficult to prospect, I know, I’ve made thousands of prospecting calls over my career. As a sales professional, I have empathy for other sales people prospecting. Generally, I’ll answer a phone call, if I’m in and available. Generally, I will listen to someone and give them a chance. So I do everything I can to be a good, well behaved prospect. But in spite of that, it’s hard not to be […]
Whose Job Are You Doing?
Mike Weinberg wrote a terrific post in the series we are doing at Openview Labs site. The post, Your #1 Priority As A Sales Manager (Plus 3 Things To Stop Doing) is brilliant. One quote stands out: “Your job as the sales leader is to ensure your sales team produces results, not do the work!” Too often, I see sales managers who are actually doing the sales people’s jobs, not their jobs as sales manager. Some of it is the result of misguided sales managers playing Super Salesperson. You know those types of managers. The one’s that feel no one […]
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, […]