Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
The Discovery
Like most of us, I’ve come to rely on—and use as an excuse—constant on-line accessibility. Email, Twitter, blogs, instantaneous web access. Imagine my panic walking into the office this morning to find no web access! My morning routine is usually, look at my calendar and priorities for the day, quickly process email, spend some time on Twitter and the various social sites, do a blog post. I spend the first hour of the day on those things, then I head to meetings, calls and so forth. But this morning was different, the web in the office was down! I was […]
The Survey Says: “You MUST Be Ecstatic With Us!”
Surveys are and should be a powerful way of getting feedback. Properly used, they can provide great insight on where you are doing well and where you can improve. Too often, however, surveys are being abused. They may be thinly disguised marketing efforts, abusive self promotion, or a terrible substitute for “customer service.” Then there are those surveys that only allow you to give them the input they want to hear, “You MUST Be Ecstatic With Us!” I’m genuinely interested in the power of surveys for insight and improvement, so I tend to respond to every survey I get–both to […]
It’s Not The Commitments We Make, It’s Those That We Keep
Sales people are always making commitments. “We can solve your problems!” “We absolutely can meet your schedules?” “We have no problems meeting your terms.” “I’ll have an answer to that by……” “I’ll be there Friday at 9:30 am…….” The problem we have is not making commitments, it’s keeping them. In fact, as I speak with customers, the key differentiator they see is this ability to keep commitments. From the point of view of the customer, the ability of the sales person to meet commitments–no matter how small, is a reflection of the ability of their company to meet commitments. So […]
Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks! (Are The Pups’ Learning As Well?)
Continually learning and improving our skills is critical, regardless of how “seasoned” we may be. It’s been a real joy through my career to have the opportunity to learn from my experiences, and more importantly from that of others. In virtually every engagement, we are privileged to learn from some of the smartest people in business, sales, and marketing–our clients. One of the reasons I am so active in social media (beyond the ego gratification of folks like you reading my ramblings), is that I’ve met so many great people and been able to learn from them. Today, I had […]
Making Progress, What Do We Talk About Next?
So you’ve finally qualified a deal, you have something real to compete for, an opportunity to win. Usually, you start planning what you need to do, make some calls, find out what they want, prepare a proposal, present your solution, close the deal. Simple. In reality it seems things drag on and on and on and….. We blame the customer, they aren’t moving forward. In some cases, that’s true, but too often, I think much of the blame rests with us–the sales person. When I sit down and review deals with people, the strategies seem unfocused. Some sales calls where […]
What Impressions Are You Creating?
My friend Bob Thompson of CustomerThink posed an interesting question the other day. Bob’s really an authority on customer experience and tends to take a broader view of customer experience than most–and I think he is right. We talk a lot about the buying experience and the customer experience, as though those are the most critical things to consider and measure as we look at the overall topic of customer experience. As intense and focused as they may be, I think we miss a huge amount by just discussing these. While not elegant, we need to be thinking about the impressions both […]