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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 Unfinished Business Of The Year
The end of the year is approaching quickly. As is usual, we are consumed/distracted with a lot of things. Month end, Quarter end, for many Year end. We’re rushing to make those last minute numbers, perhaps get some of those year end dollars. Pile on top of that, the New Year, which for many of us means to start planning for 2015 Kick-offs, programs, new quotas, new goals, looking forward with anticipation. Then there is the personal side, Holiday plans and celebrations, family, friends…… It’s easy to get caught up in all of this, but there are some important pieces […]
Each Of Us Can Make A Difference!
For those of you who have followed this blog for some time, you know this is the time of year I ask you for money. For the past 3 years, I’ve sponsored campaigns through Charity:Water to provide wells and potable drinking water to 10’s of thousands of people in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. You’ve been very generous in your support and in your giving. Not just to this campaign, but I get notes from dozens of you on your own efforts. For some it’s providing meals for the homeless in your communities. Others it’s contributing time and money to […]
What If You Shared Your Deal Strategy With Your Customer?
I had a fascinating conversation with Gerald Vanderpuye today. He shared what many of us would think as the Nightmare To End All Nightmares. He was working a huge deal, it was important to the company’s ability to make their numbers for the quarter. Deals like that get a lot of visibility all the way to top management, so as expected, top management in his company wanted to do a deal review. He updated his deal strategy, sent it to all the key managers to prepare for a discussion during the review of what he was doing to win the […]
Hacking Sales Management
I’ve been writing a short series on Hacking Selling–(Hacking Selling, Hacking Selling Part 2). As with the prior articles, I get huge numbers of requests from sales manager to help Hack their jobs. “What are the short cuts?” “How do I manage my time better?” “How do I get things done more easily?” As with the other articles, most of the hacks are very well known. Every year there are hundreds to thousands of articles about them, there’s lots of data that speaks to the impact these hacks have. Yet, somehow, too many people don’t use them–for reasons that are […]
Hacking Selling Part 2
As I mentioned in Hacking Selling, sales people and managers constantly ask me for short cuts. They are looking at ways to make selling easier, ways to help them win more business. In Hacking Selling, I said the easiest way to do this is to hack the customer’s business, focusing on what they need, rather than what we sell. I got a lot of messages on the post. People wanted more short cuts, so I’ve put together a list for sales people. I’ll follow this with another post for sales managers. Most of these hacks have been around a long […]
When All Else Is Equal, The Lowest Price Wins!
When the customer perceives little difference between alternative solutions from vendors, the lowest price wins! And that’s how it should be, it would be insane for the customer to do anything else. Now before you start leaping to conclusions thinking that I’m promoting rampant discounting to win business, let me clarify things. Too often, we fail to differentiate our solutions and value in meaningful ways. As the customer compares both our offerings and their buying experience with other alternatives, it’s difficult for them to find any meaningful differentiation. As a result, the only substantive differentiation is pricing. So when the […]