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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
Ditching The Performance Review
I was astounded to read “Let’s Kill The Performance Review” by Liz Ryan. I agree with many of the things she states. The majority of performance review/performance management systems in companies are broken–or at least dysfunctional. It consumes too much unproductive time, with unclear benefit. It’s not a necessary process for compensation management (though I do like compensation tied to performance.) Performance plans as a protection against legal action isn’t really a good defense. And while she doesn’t say it, most managers are poorly trained at setting performance expectations, coaching to them and evaluating performance. But a recommendation to kill […]
Establishing Credibility
In prospecting, one of the most important and difficult things to do is establishing credibility. But without this, moving forward, trying to get any type of engagement is impossible. Too often, sales people are oblivious to this—this applies to the really bad sales people who don’t deserve to be selling. Or they do a really poor job establishing credibility, this applies mostly to mediocre sales people. The challenge is, how do we establish credibility-or at least enough to get the customer to respond? The classic mistake sales people make in thinking about establishing credibility, is “We have to talk about […]
Understanding Transactional Buying
There are 1000’s of articles about transactional selling. The collective wisdom of most of those posts can be summarized as follows: “Transactional selling sucks!” It does! To expand on what most of these say, it not only sucks, the only way you can win is on price, and “real sellers” want to avoid it at all costs. Others say that it is all going the way of the web and e-procurement, so there is really no “selling opportunity.” But the focus on transactional selling has blinded us to transactional buying and the real value we can create for those customers […]
Your Current Sales Training Is Just Table Stakes!
As a sales professional, hopefully, you are upgrading your skills, not only learning but executing what you have learned from your sales training. Hopefully, you’ve had recent exposure to some of the really great consultative, solution, insight, Challenger training programs. Mastery of these skills is important in today’s and tomorrow’s worlds of selling. Without these skills, at least in complex B2B selling, you will simply be outsold by those who are effectively leveraging these skills in competing against you. If you aren’t leveraging these skills in every aspect of your job, you will simply be irrelevant to the customer. You […]
Powerful LinkedIn Networking!
I received a LinkedIn email from an individual, apparently one of my LinkedIn connections. This person presents himself as a LinkedIn Guru, selling his services to help people master and leverage LinkedIn to the best advantage. So in receiving this email, I expected to see a master at work, hoping to learn from it. The email is in it’s entirety except the final signature block. I’ve inserted a few comments in [brackets.] Dear Cherished 1st Degree Connections. [I’m not sure how cherished I feel when I look at his distribution list. I’m also not sure how happy I am to have […]
Being Right Doesn’t Count, Engaging The Customer Does!
Within 30 minutes this morning, two things happened. First, a good friend called ranting and raving about a prospecting call that went wrong. Then I saw Todd Schnick’s brilliant post on the same issue. Let me backtrack a little. My friend called, very upset about a prospecting call yesterday. It was an important prospect, he’d managed to get agreement from the VP of Sales for a conversation, so he called. A few things happened initially, that put the call on a bad track. Something had come up with the VP and it wasn’t the most convenient time, but my friend […]