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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
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 […]
“Let’s Catch Up……”
A couple of times a day, I skim my “Junk Mail” folder checking to see if there are legit messages then emptying it. The minute it takes me to do this also provides great comic relief on the hundreds of inept prospecting emails I get. These are legitimate emails from well established companies–not the emails asking me to buy cheap drugs or to help free a fortune held captive in a West African company. They are emails from well established brands/companies. Unfortunately, they’ve bought a list from a disreputable list management firm, or they’ve scraped the web, or they’ve “deconstructed” […]
Letting The Customer “Opt-Out” Is Not A Nurturing Strategy
I had an interesting, unexpected reaction to my “Stop Nurturing Me” post. An individual commented, “prospects have the option to opt-out of being nurtured, as do customers…..” The comment, while well intended, frankly struck me as very misguided. Forcing the customer to opt-out is actually an indication of a massive failure on our part. It means we haven’t taken the time to really understand the customer—their journey to learn and educate themselves, their “squishy buying cycle,” and their quest for more learning once they’ve bought. If we are building high quality, impactful content; if we are trying to build customer […]