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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
“Let’s See How Much We Can Confuse Our Customers!”
I actually wanted to title this, “Let’s See How Much We Can Screw With Our Customer’ Minds,” but decided against it. I know no company would purposefully try to confuse it’s customers, making it very difficult for them to understand their offerings and buy. Unfortunately, that’s an unintended consequence of a lot of what I see happening in too many Go To Customer Strategies. Recently, I was reviewing the Go To Market Strategy of a software company. Actually, I was doing some competitive analysis for a client and struck gold. My client’s competitor had done what too many others do. […]
But My Manager Doesn’t Coach!
If you are the sensitive sort, particularly about this topic, you may just want to skip this post, I’m a little angry. After writing, Who Benefits Most From Coaching, I was deluged with emails and comments on various forums. All had the same basic theme: “The managers in my company don’t seem to care about coaching.” Or, “It is non existent in my company, how do I get coaching when managers don’t want to coach?” I was surprised and disappointed by the number of sales people expressing those sentiments. I don’t understand “managers” who don’t view coaching as a critical element […]
“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……. […]