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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
Teaching Our Customers
There’s a lot of talk about the role of the sales person as a “Teacher.” It’s an important concept, but one that’s always been a key element of the sales person’s role. But I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what effective teaching really is. So much of the literature seems to focus on Teaching As An Event. There’s a lot of discussion around the Teaching Pitch. I’m probably overstating this, but it conjures up the image of that single impactful presentation where the customer immediately says, “Yes,” and pulls out an order form. Somehow focusing on an […]
Not Your Normal Sales Presentation
I have to admit, up front, generally I don’t find books about sales presentations very useful. Maybe, more accurately, I probably found the very first book I’ve read interesting, then subsequent books virtually copies of the original book. Somehow, books about sales presentations seem to focus either on, “Building The Killer Deck.” There’s the famous 10-20-30 rule. Or a lot of them focus on “Presentation Style,” how you actually speak and present offering great insights like, “Generally, it’s not a good practice to pick your nose in front of your audience.” (OK, I made that up, but it’s still fantastic […]
The Sales Process Is Critical To Customer Experience
Recently I was at one of those giant events, you know, where sales leaders come together to talk about the challenges they face in growing their business. At dinner one evening, I was talking to a three executives, comparing notes on a new tool each was considering buying and implementing in their organizations. The conversation was fascinating, each had a completely different understanding of the tool and what it could do. Each also had very different opinions about the company that had developed and offered the tool. The conversation was almost surreal, it was as if they were talking about three […]
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 […]