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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
Proving That Math Works
Every week I sit in reviews of all types. It may be a corporation or start-up’s business plan or business strategy. It may be a sales person’s territory plan, forecast, or pipeline review. It may be a sales manager or executive reviewing their overall business plan. It may be a marketing manager reviewing a new marketing program and the expected results or a product manager talking about a product forecast or launch. In all of these people are making various claims about the numbers that will be achieved. But too often, it seems to be an exercise in proving that […]
Beginning, Finishing, The Space In Between
Yesterday I had the privilege of spending a day with the founding team of one of the most exciting start-ups I’ve seen in years. These people are sharp, excited, and have an idea that can change the lives of business professionals as much as the telephone, email, and social applications have. But, I can’t go further — for the moment. I made a pinky swear of confidentiality with the CEO. They are in stealth mode but should be launching in a few months. Stay tuned. But our meetings got me started thinking about how we–business professionals–spend certain parts of our […]
Salesperson As Entrepreneur
When you think about it, sales people have an awesome amount of freedom–but also a huge amount of personal responsibility. In many senses, we really are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs run their own businesses. They have goals, translated both to financial (revenue, earnings, growth), and strategic (share, market visibility, brand reputation, etc.) They develop strategies and plans to achieve their goals, invest in resources (people, facilities, capital, etc.) to execute the plans. Great entrepreneurs are relentless, driven, disciplined and focused. They make no personal excuses, and focus on optimizing the deployment of resources and performance within their organizations. Being an entrepreneur gives […]
Unique, Differentiated? But Are You Relevant?
It’s critical that we differentiate our offerings and solutions from the alternatives the customer is considering. Marketing, product management, and sales all spend endless hours trying to figure out that differentiation, to create that edge. But too often we get it wrong. We focus on unique features and functions of our products, how our approach is different and better. About a year ago, someone shared a differentiation document their product management team had put together. It was 200 pages. It went through each screen and each field of their software product. It had very valuable tips like, “The way the […]
Why Do You Sell?
The other day I was having a conversation with someone. He asked a very intriguing question, “Why do you do what you do?” He was referring to my businesses and how I work. It got me to thinking, we each need to reflect periodically about the choices we make in our lives and careers. It’s easy to get distracted by all the activities and the sheer momentum of work, but if we don’t reflect periodically, we lose our ways. As a result, our effectiveness plummets. We start putting in the hours, but they have no meaning and it becomes work–drudgery. Why […]
Losing The Negotiation Before It Starts!
Sales people seem to be obsessed with negotiation. They read books, they take all sorts of classes, they strategize “negotiation” sessions. Oddly, when I push on the negotiation issue, most negotiations that sales people focus on is about price. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been involved in a lot of very complex negotiations for very complex deals and projects. Price is always an element, but there are a whole number of other elements–actually usually focused on ensuring each party has thought through things and is committed to shared success. There are lots of scenarios that require very complex negotiations, but for most […]