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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
Learning To Teach
I’ve been writing about “teaching our customers” these days. To often, what I see of teaching is a more advanced form of a pitch. Rather than pitching our products, we are now pitching business issues the customer should be concerned about. Perhaps they are trends in the industry, opportunities they may be missing, opportunities for them to improve their operations. I suppose there is some merit to this, at least we are talking about the customers’ issues and not about our products. But too often, they don’t translate to collaborative discussions, shared learning, and taking action with the customer. It’s also curious, that we seem to […]
Creating Crap At The Speed Of Light!
Everyone is talking about social selling! We have new tools, techniques, and capabilities to engage more people, more differently than we ever have before. Social selling dominates many conversations. Many would have you think social selling (social media, social marketing, social business, or whatever you call it) is the silver bullet. Just do thing socially, prospects will come out of the woodwork, they’ll engage, they’ll pull out PO’s–pre-empting your twitter stream, blog posts, LinkedIn outreach. Often, it seems to be a Field of Dreams approach, “If we do it socially, they will come.” Social engagement has changed our business profoundly. […]
Are You ‘Pissed Off’ Enough To Be A Top Performer?
I saw a brilliant video by Tom Peters, Innovation: Angry People Make Change, be sure to watch it. Being pissed off, angry, impatient is an important concept around success–particularly in sales. Now before some of you jump all over me, these concepts represent a double edged sword. We have to harness the positive, or constructive aspects of these characteristics if we are to be successful. The negative, destructive aspects are a sure path to failure. I think so much of what causes us–and our customers to fail to achieve our potential is that we aren’t pissed off. Sure we may be annoyed, hassled, […]
Do You Know How Your Customer Is Measured?
As sales people, we’re used to being measured. We have pipeline metrics, quotas. We may have weekly call or meeting goals. We have prospecting goals, and on and on and on. Metrics are important to knowing how we are doing in achieving our goals. Some of those metrics are critical in evaluating performance or to our compensation plans. Every sales person understands how they are measured and are driven to achieve their goals. Our customers are no different, they have goals for which they are accountable. They have metrics that let them know how they are doing. Do you know how your […]
Before We Can “Teach” Our Customers, We Have To First Learn From Them
Teaching our customers is a cornerstone of Challenger, Insight Selling, and just plain good sales practice. We want to help our customers learn. It’s actually not that new a concept–we’ve always taught our customers something. It used to be about our products, or our solutions, or our companies. Now the context of teaching has changed–really for the better for both customers, sales and marketing. Today, the teaching that customers value is teaching them about their businesses, customers, markets. What could they do better? What could they do differently? What opportunities might they address? How do they better engage their customers, […]
Why I Won’t Respond To Your Email!
I get at least a couple 100 emails a day (not including the SPAM). A lot of them are trying to sell me on something. Most I quickly delete, but some are interesting and intriguing. Some of the interesting emails are offers to explore a collaboration, people interested in getting me to do something for/with them, some outright trying to sell me something–but still interesting. However interesting many are, I won’t respond to them–I don’t delete them, I keep a file of “bad email marketing examples.” Here’s why I won’t respond to those emails. They are addressed, “Hi,” or “Hi […]