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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 Devil Is In The Details
I suppose it’s human nature not to look at details. If I look at the pace of business and life, the workloads each of us have, it’s easy to gloss over things. We look at reports, only looking at the summary data, not looking at or understanding the data itself. There are countless examples: Sales people are making the right number of outbound calls, activity levels are right—but if the quality of the calls is garbage, then we are wasting our time. We don’t know that unless we drill down into the details of the calls themselves. For example, listening […]
What Do You Want To Know?
We all know that preparation for a meeting is important. We want to connect well with people, we want to create a positive impression, we want to accomplish something. As we prepare for a meeting, there are all sorts of things we may want to research and prepare for. There are great tools to help us in that process. We learn a lot about a person by looking at their personal social profile leveraging LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other tools. We can learn about their company by visiting their website and leveraging all sorts of other tools (e.g. Insideview, Hoovers, […]
Can You Show Me Your Plan For This Interview?
Recently I was asked to my views on the best interview questions for sales hires. It was published in a great ebook from Openview Ventures. Be sure to take a look at it, there are some great questions from some very smart people. One of my favorite questions for an interview is, “Can you show me your plan for this interview?” The reason I like it is that we know research and preparation for a sales call is critical to our effectiveness. If we want to move the customer through their buying process, if we want to create great value and outcomes […]
Hanging Out Where Our Customers Hang Out
I recently saw an infographic from the Brighton School Of Business entitled, “Do You have What It Takes To Become A CEO?” There was a lot of interesting data there, but several one category captured me. They wanted to assess the social media activity of the Fortune 500 CEO’s. Their conclusion was, “today’s top CEOs aren’t very active on social media.” It followed with the following: 28% have a LinkedIn profile (They didn’t assess how active that 28% was in LinkedIn, for example, do they update their status, are they active on groups, etc.). 7% are on Facebook. 6% are Twitter. […]
Curiosity, Critical For Sales And Leadership
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is a critical competency for top performing sales people and sales leaders. Oddly, enough, I’ve seldom have seen anyone write about it, I seldom see it listed as a skill we look for in recruiting. It’s curiosity that drives a sales person to wander around their accounts and territories–building relationships, finding out what’s on the minds of customers, finding opportunities they may be missing, areas to improve. It’s curiosity that drives the sales person (and manager) to find out what drives people, what their dreams and aspirations are, what frustrates them, what […]
Stop Wasting Your Money On Sales Training!
This title will draw several immediate reactions. There’s probably a round of cheering from those who’ve been subjected to bad sales training programs. Simultaneously, there are a number who will be saying, “This is absolute heresy, how can you say this?” Both reactions are probably right on target. Every year, billions are spent on various types of sales training. Some of it is internally developed, focused on product skills or other topics; some is purchased from vendors of very high quality programs. But too often, the training doesn’t achieve the expected goals. Of course there are some poorly designed and executed training […]