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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 Entrepreneurial Spirit In Sales, A Discussion With Nikolaus Kimla
Today I had the great pleasure of participating in a discussion of the Entrepreneurial Spirit In Sales. Richard Young, and Martha Neumeister hosted the discussion between Nikolaus Kimla, CEO of Pipeliner CRM and me. It was a fun discussion, even though we barely scratched the surface of the topic. To follow the Twitter discussion search for #Saleseu Thanks to everyone at Pipeliner CRM, particularly Nikolaus, Richard and Martha for making me feel so welcome!
Talk To Someone Different Or New!
I suppose it’s human nature to invest our professional time in the people with whom we have the closest relationships. Yet, in business and sales, spending our time with the same people–either within our company, professional community, and most importantly, in our customers can be severely limiting. Mythology would have it, that sales people are constantly meeting new people and developing relationships–but most of my experience indicates this is largely not true. If it were, we wouldn’t see the constant flood of articles and best practice saying “Prospect!” The reality, is we tend to go back to the same people […]
Why Choose Mediocrity?
The difference between mediocrity and greatness isn’t that much, but I’m constantly amazed by how many choose mediocrity. Our companies spend millions in the best sales training and tools, but we don’t use them. We know that we are supposed to be customer focused if we want to engage and connect with our customers, but we choose to focus on our products and ourselves. We know we are supposed to create value in every exchange we have with the customer, but we don’t take the few minutes before the meeting to figure out the value we create. We know we […]
Personal Referrals — Keep Them Personal
Over the past several weeks, I’ve seen a number of sales people and teams on the verge of “rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory.” In each case, they had managed to get personal referrals to people they really wanted to meet. These referrals were pure gold-opening doors that might otherwise have taken months to open. But then “stuff” started to happen. I don’t know whether it was anxiety, a rush to establish credibility, a rush to “close,” or just lapse of clear thinking. In each case, they took the referral and started to “de-personalize them.” In several, they immediately […]
Crossing The Chasm, Selling And Buying Process
First, apologies to Geoffrey Moore and his seminal book Crossing The Chasm. Several of my recent posts have stimulated discussions about the chasm between our Selling Process and our s’ Buying Processes. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about, ‘Shouldn’t we be focusing on their buying process,” “How do we bridge the selling and buying processes, ” “How do we manage to two processes simultaneously,” and a number of others. These are great and difficult issues. I think the best way to start bridging the gap is to focus on where do we start in designing the process? Usually, when we think […]
Sales Acceleration, Some Thoughts
I’m preparing for a video discussion with Andy Paul. He’s been an ardent evangelist on the topic of Sales Acceleration (You need to read his latest book, AMP Up Your Sales.). I know we will be spending a lot of time discussing the topic, but I thought I’d use this post as a stalking horse to start thinking about the topic of Sales Acceleration. First, I’ll choose to define it in my terms–Andy, I’m sure will straighten me out–but I think sales acceleration is simply “how do we accelerate our ability to achieve our goals.” There are all sorts […]