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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
Are You Boring, Or Simply Irrelevant?
Last week, a couple of my friends looked at a couple of different, but parallel issues. Jim Keenan published You’re Boring. I struggled through the post, took me a couple cups of coffee to stay awake—just kidding Jim! Dave Stein posed a question about Age Discrimination on Google +. (It’s hard being a 26 year old, with Grey hair, people mistakenly think I’m much older.) The root of both these issues is “Are You Relevant?” Too often, people confuse the wrong things. Using the latest, coolest technology. Following the latest trends, whether music, appearance, tools. Being seen at the “right […]
Buyer Verified Forecasts
Imagine a world of accurate sales forecasts. Imagine prospects relieving sales people of the need to do forecasts. Monthly, they send a report to the sales manager, “Your guys are working with us on this deal. We’re going to make a decision and place an order in 75 days, right now we view the probability of the deal going to you as 73% and we expect the PO to be $1,553946.17 (roughly).” Hang on, no I’m not smoking anything, I am dreaming a little. We’ll probably never reach the day of buyer verified forecasts, but we can dramatically improve the […]
No Free Lunch, Investing In Sales And Marketing
My friend, Anthony Iannarino wrote an interesting post, A Cheap Sales Force Is An Expensive Problem. He hits on a critical issue and mistake–one that I see too many entrepreneurs and small business owners make, often with devastating results. Too many entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have an appreciation for the value of sales and marketing, probably because they don’t understand the functions. All the investments made in product development, manufacturing, services, infrastructure are wasted if the company fails to acquire paying customers! It’s kind of like buying a Ferrari, but then equipping it with the cheapest possible tires […]
How Do You Make Money?
How Do You Make Money? This question, and it’s variants, is probably the single most important question for us to understand. Being able to answer this question and it’s variants is critical to our success as sales professionals. It’s not a simple or a trivial question. The unprepared would give simple and trivial answers, “we sell stuff.” But the question is actually profound and your ability to answer it is critical to success. Let’s look at it, but with some twists. Variant 1, How do our customers make money? To answer this properly, we have to understand their markets, competitors, business strategies, […]
Hanging Out Where Our Customers Hang Out
I’ve been writing a several posts about social technologies and social selling (“Hiding” Behind Social Selling and What’s All This About Social Selling). One of the key points of the articles and the many great comments is, social selling and social technologies are different. Selling is social–regardless of the technology we use. Social technologies can expand and accelerate our ability to engage and connect in meaningful ways with customers. Usage of social platforms and technologies continues to skyrocket. There are many that say “Engagement is all about the web and social platforms, that’s where all the action is at, that’s […]
“Hiding” Behind Social Selling
The post, “What’s All This About Social Selling,” provoked a lot of reaction. As I started reading the discussions, I started thinking more. Do the “social tools,” make us less social? As you know from the article, I believe “social selling” or “social business” starts with a set of beliefs or values about how you want to connect with, engage, and create value for the customer and prospects. Selling has always been “social,” it’s always been about people connecting, engaging, creating value. The channels by which we connect change and technology enables this. But do the many of the social […]