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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
Do You Respect Your People Enough To Fire Them?
Unfortunately, one of the biggest sins I see in performance management is avoidance. Usually, we’re good at recognizing problem performers. We’re just terrible in dealing with them. There all sorts of reasons we avoid dealing with them–all bad. They include: Dealing with problem performers takes a lot of time. Dealing with problem performers is no fun–for both the manager and the problem performer. Dealing with problem performers creates stressful, sometimes confrontive situations. Most people tend to avoid these. But to me, the ultimate betrayal of trust, the ultimate form of disrespect of an individual is not to deal with the […]
I Owe A Sales Person An Apology!
Friday late afternoon, I was rushing to finish a few things. My wife and I had planned a nice evening out, but I wanted to clean my physical and virtual desks of work. The phone rang, a woman asked, “May I speak to Kacey about your payroll issues?” “Arrgghhh, ” I thought, “some clueless sales person.” Instead I responded, “Kacey isn’t in. She’s one of our marketing assistants, and has nothing to do with payroll (though I’m sure she would love to).” The sales woman responds, “Oh, we were misinformed, we thought she had payroll responsibility. Can you tell me […]
“Solve Your Problem Before I Have To Solve Mine”
It happened many years ago, but I still remember it as though it was yesterday. I was sitting with my manager on a Friday morning doing a review. I was fortunate to manage one of the hottest groups of sales people in the hottest market space in the company. My team of about 60 people was on track to blow our numbers away–again. We would produce $300-400 Million in revenue, lock in our position as global share leader in the solution space. I thought we were flying, and the meeting would be like our usual Friday meetings, exploring how we […]
Live By Your Products, Die By Your Products!
We’re in love with our products. At the drop of a hat, we will wax on endlessly about features, functions, feeds, speeds, and, of course, price. We get all hot and lathered about the product and want to get our prospects and customers hot and lathered about our products. The good news, if that’s what the customer cares about, and they have a few million idle dollars hanging around, they might buy our products. But here’s where we struggle. Not a lot of folks have idle money hanging around. So they can’t buy our products, regardless how hot and lathered […]
The Seller’s Process Or Journey
x Connect via LinkedIn Subject Message Connect Yes, you read it correctly. The title of this post is the Seller’s Process. I’m not trying to play word games, but rather suggest that we (sellers) need to dramatically shift our points of view about how we engage prospects and customers (buyers), along with that, change the words we use to describe the process. Let me explain what I mean by starting with the customer–which is where everything really should start. There are thousands of post, articles, books glibly talking about the buying process, the buyer’s journey, the customer journey. […]
How Well Do I Have To Know My Customer?
x Connect via LinkedIn Subject Message Connect There are some interesting discussions about the amount of research required to prospect and engage customers. Inevitably, the search is for the right answer—or probably realistically, it’s “give me the answer I want to hear.” The answer we want to hear is, “What’s the minimal amount of work I need to do to be able to contact and engage a customer?” The reality is probably something more like: It depends, and Regardless of the answer, you have to do the work. And it probably all evens out in the end, meaning–there […]