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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
Don’t Bother Me With Process!
Maureen Blanford challenged me with an interesting question, “What do you do with a person that consistently makes their numbers, but refuses to use the process?” It’s a great question, here’s my take. First, some set up. The sales process represents our organization’s best practices in winning business. We develop the sales process by looking at what our top performers consistently do to win deals, analyzing past wins and losses, and making sure what we do through the sales process is aligned and creates value through the customer buying process. Consequently, leveraging the sales process is critical to getting each […]
Keeping Score
I’ve been having a number of conversations that, to be honest, have surprised me a little. They’ve focused on winning, losing, competing, and accountability. I suppose I’m really a hardliner on the issue of performance and accountability. Selling is an outcomes focused profession (frankly, I think most jobs are or should be outcomes focused). Results count, we are accountable for producing results for our companies and customers. In the end, we either achieve the results we have committed to achieve or we haven’t. And we keep score. We’re measured in the outcomes we produce by quotas, revenue targets, or something […]
Don’t Sell Where You Lose!
“Well duuuhhh, Dave, thanks for that great insight!” As obvious as it sounds, one of the fastest ways to improve organizational or individual performance is to stop trying to sell where you lose. Yet, as obvious as it sounds, too many of the behaviors I see are focused exactly on that–selling where we lose. The problem is, too often we blindly chase after bad deals. Prospects ask for information, and the sales person is immediately forecasting it as a close. We blindly dial, making dozens of calls every day, desperately trying to find deals. If a prospect fogs a mirror, […]
Insight, Clarity, Execution
We all struggle to change, to do new things, to grow, to implement new strategies, initiatives, and programs. Too often, we and our customers fall short. We don’t quite achieve the goal, we change midstream, we abandon what we were seeking to achieve, pursuing something completely different. Sometimes, change is more difficult than we anticipated. Surprises emerge, we forgot to consider certain things, circumstances change. We have greater problems aligning everyone around the change initiative and move forward. It’s inevitable that many change initiatives lose steam, not for lack of enthusiasm or even commitment, but we just lose our way. It’s not for lack […]
Thinking Of Others, Water Changes Everything!
We’re entering a New Year, many glad to have the past behind us, filled with energy and optimism for the New Year! Most everyone reading this post has been blessed with great fortune. We don’t have to worry about basic things. We have a place to live, we have friends and colleagues, we have food, access to healthcare, and water. We tend to take those for granted, focusing on other things. We don’t have to worry about surviving–living. Yet millions of people have to worry about that every day–surviving. Millions don’t have access to the most basic requirement for survival—potable water. Over […]
Putting Ideas Into Practice!
It’s that time of year. For many organizations, it’s the finish of the old year and the start of a new one. It’s a time when we put so much behind us, developing plans for a new and better year. New goals, new programs, new initiatives, new systems and tools, maybe some new products. It’s a great time, not only for organizations, but for each of us as professionals, to reflect and think about change. What worked in the past 12 months, what didn’t? What skills should we develop to stay at the front of our profession and to more effectively serve […]