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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
If It’s Common Sense, Why Isn’t It Common Practice?
I was having coffee with a close friend, @francineallaire, this morning. She’s an outstanding sales professional. As we often do, our conversation drifted to the challenges of professional selling. We talked about how sales people have a tendency to make things overly complicated. So much time is spent on techniques to catch the customer’s attention. In the worst case, some resort to trickery and manipulation. More often, we fail to connect with customers because we talk about what we want to talk about, not what they want to talk about. Other times, we simply are wasting our customer’s time. As we […]
Lean Sales And Marketing -TAKT Time
For those of you with a background in Lean, TAKT Time is a familiar concept for manufacturing, but what’s the application to sales and marketing? TAKT actually comes from the German word, Taktzeit, which refers to the cycle time, beat or rhythm. It’s a powerful concept for Lean manufacturing. We want the line to run as efficiently as possible in fulfilling customer demand. Slow down’s, back ups, line starts and stops are all problems. They create inefficiencies and costs in the manufacturing process, as well as adversely impacting the ability to fulfill customer demand. TAKT time is an important concept […]
The Intrusiveness Of Prospecting
I’ve been carrying on a number of discussions in various forums on LinkedIn. It’s been with people reacting to my post, “Well It Worked, Didn’t It?” One of the key themes in these discussions is prospecting, with people taking all sorts of positions, and lot of discussion about the “C” word–yes, Cold Calling. Let’s face it, most of us don’t like prospecting. We’d rather be working a deal. Speaking to a customer who already knows us and is working with us to solve a problem. Finding new deals is a pain! We have to do a lot of work, we have […]
Reading The Buyers’ Minds
As sales people, we always are trying to get into our Buyers’ minds. We want to understand what they are thinking, what drives them, how we can position ourselves and our solutions most favorably. We constantly search for some insight about how to connect more effectively. I’m always fascinated by the machinations we go through to understand what’s going on in our Buyers’ minds. We talk to each other to try to figure out, “What do buyers think?” “How do we engage them?” We do research, we guess-based on our experience. All great things to do. We look for tricks […]
The Importance Of “Cross Training” For Sales
The next 6-8 weeks represent one of those “died and gone to heaven” periods for sports enthusiasts. The Euro 2012 Finals in Soccer, Wimbledon, the Tour de France, and the summer Olympics–just to mention a few. It’s exciting to see the competition–the very best in the world competing at the highest levels. One of the things I like the best in watching these events is the “back story,” the story of how people got to the event. Their discipline, their focus, their training and constant practice (10,000 hours to mastery is a drop in the bucket for many), the coaching–and […]
Lean Sales And Marketing — It’s How We Put It All Together
Several years ago, I was the guest speaker at the National Sales Meeting for a very large technology company. The theme they had selected for the meeting and the year was, “It’s how we put it together that sets us apart!” This is actually a core concept to Lean and very important as we think about applying these principles to Lean Sales and Marketing. It’s also an area that deserves many more posts, so this is just the starting point. Organizations that really understand and apply Lean, understand that Lean is a “systems or holistic approach.” While we may be […]