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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
“What Can You Do For Me?”
Wipe away all the fancy words and stuff we talk about in selling, the fundamental question we have to confront is that which is most important to the customer or prospect, “What Can You Do For Me?” And here’s the crux of the problem for far too many sales people. They don’t know! (As a side note, when I pose that question to a sales person, the more they start waving their hands around, the more animated they get in talking about their product, the more I know they are clueless about the answer to that question.) Think of all […]
Who Benefits Most From Coaching?
Sometimes, I feel like I may be living on a different planet. I read all sorts of articles about coaching from some very thoughtful, smart, and successful people. Many of those articles have provocative titles or themes like, Who Benefits Most From Coaching? Where Should You Spend Your Time Coaching? Should you focus on A’s, B’s, C’s? The list goes on. In many ways, the articles make huge amounts of sense. Intellectually, I get it, I agree with the concepts the authors are talking about. I can even get the math many people use–“raising the performance of an A player 10% […]
What I Finally Got About “Unlearning”
Unlearning has become a popular concept recently. At first, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, I tended to think it a clever play on words. But over time, I’ve started to grasp the importance of “unlearning.” When I first heard the concept, in my warped mind, I likened it to a form of “forgetting,” which all of us are all to familiar with. Forgetting has nothing to do with unlearning, forgetting is just sloppiness, carelessness, and lack of discipline. Yeah, I’m being a little tough, we all forget–but it’s so easy to not to be forgetful. We’ve […]
What’s All The Fuss About Social Selling?
There’ve been a lot of articles about social selling going around. As one would expect, many representing social selling as the answer to every sales person’s prayer. Many representing the complete opposite saying it’s a waste of time, and others. To be honest, I struggle with the term “social selling.” I think it conjures up expectations of managing the entire sales process through Twitter, ultimately getting a shortened link with a PO through Twitter. Others may be looking for a shopping cart function in LinkedIn, so they can get orders and collect money. Discussions about “How many sales has twitter/linkedin/facebook/tumblr/foursquare……. […]
How Is Your Customer Measured?
Ask a sales person how they’re measured, they quickly respond, “quota attainment.” Every sales person know what they are accountable for, where they are year to date, and hopefully, what they need to do to close any attainment gap (but that’s another post.). Some sales people have a richer set of metrics, and will take you through them. We all tend to be very focused on our goals and achieving our goals. Our customers are no different, they have goals and performance plans. Their performance is being evaluated by how well they achieve their goals. It could mean a promotion. […]
Developing Insight—Just Read, Observe, Ask
We struggle with developing Insight. Sure, we need help and support from marketing, product management, and others in the organization. But there’s a huge amount we can do on our own. The other day, I was reading the Wall Street Journal (One of about three “newspapers” I read every evening.) There was a fascinating article featuring issues CFO’s, and other executives worry about. They posed seven questions strategically minded CFO’s care about—which means we should care about them: How does your company plan to grow, through M&A or Organically? What are the dominant constraints that hold back your company’s growth, […]