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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
Working Hard
I meet thousands of sales people a year. Most of them really care about the job they are doing. Most of them work very hard–they put in long hours, they are constantly busy. But too often, they miss their goals. It’s not through lack of effort, but much of it is they don’t approach the hard work of sales in the proper way. This may be worded strangely, but too often, I see sales people working hard to achieve their goal, but they don’t have a plan to achieve their goal. Here’s an example. This week I’m working with a […]
How Do They Buy?
I write constantly about the buying process, understanding how customers buy, how we align our sales process with the customer’s buying process, and how we create value through the whole thing. However, I realized I’ve overlooked something. It seems so obvious, but I’ve been surprised to see how few sales people understand this–at least early in the sales process. What I’m talking about is, “How do customers buy?” I mean, once they’ve made the decision for you, once you’ve settled on the price (or at least hopefully). What do they have to go through just to issue a purchase order […]
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 […]