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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 Playing Your Game Or Someone Else’s?
Anyone who has been involved in competitive athletics at any level knows you have to play your own game. Once you start playing the opponents game, you probably lose. If by some strange chance you win, it’s after slogging it out for a very long time and it takes everything out of you. Likewise in sales, we maximize our ability to win–and bring great value to our customers by playing our own game. But there are huge numbers of things that threaten to throw us off our game. Sometimes, we get off our game, without even recognizing it until we […]
How Committed Are You?
With apologies to my Muslim, Jewish, Vegetarian, and Vegan friends, I’ll start this post with the old story: “In helping prepare the ham and egg breakfast, who was more involved, the chicken or the pig?” The response is, the chicken was involved, the pig was committed. I think this is an important distinction. We see too many people involved — being sincere, trying hard, smart, motivated, positive, very busy, but somehow something’s missing. Commitment, deep emotional commitment, seems to be one of the consistent differences between top performers and everyone else. This quality seems to be more about who we are, not […]
Are You Dealing With The Problem Owner Or The Solution Owner?
Yes, I know a few of you are scratching your heads saying, “What does Dave mean with this title?” I’ll explain, but first, I need to define a few things: We–sales people–are solution providers (hopefully). The solution owner is the group within our customer responsible for implementing solutions, but they don’t own the problem, they are helping solve the problem. For example, many of our clients sell IT solutions–hardware, software, systems. Inevitably, they call on IT, developing deep relationships with IT, responding to their needs to provide solutions to the Problem Owner–but too many aren’t calling on the Problem Owner. […]
Conflict Avoidance
You’d think I shouldn’t have to write a sales blog post about “Conflict Avoidance,” yet I feel compelled to do so. In writing this post, I feel a little like Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gecko character in the original “Wall Street.” Instead of proclaiming “Greed is Good,” I feel like proclaiming Conflict is Good–that is, conflict properly handled is good. Yet, too often, in our organizations and with our customers we avoid conflict. I sit in hundreds of meetings every year. The meetings are conflict free–to the point of being incredibly boring and a waste of time. Now understand, I’m not […]
Starting At The Top
There’s the old adage–still promoted in way too many sales training workshops, articles, and blogs: “Start at the top!” It’s wrong, it’s dumb, it’s laziness, it’s an indicator to the customer that you don’t understand their business. Don’t get me wrong. Decisions are being pushed higher in organizations. More people are getting involved, so we have to be calling higher and wider. But the most appropriate level to start your sales prospecting is the highest level of someone who cares—and no higher! Why? Well duggghhhh, they don’t care, so why are you going to waste their time? Yet too many sales people shoot […]
Meeting Our Commitments
As professionals, particularly as sales professionals, we are only as good as the commitments we meet. We’re always making commitments–to our customers, our colleagues, our managers, ourselves. But how many do we meet? We tend to make a lot of commitments, it’s easy to do—“I’ll do this,” “I’ll do that,” “I’ll get back to you with these…..” Commitments are meaningless unless we deliver on them–they become meaningless words, reducing our credibility and our trustworthiness. We also tend to waste a lot of time, recovering from the commitments we didn’t fulfill. Others come back to us, “You said you’d do this…..” […]