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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 Building Coalitions With Your Customers?
As sales professionals, we’re supposed to be great at building relationships with our customers. Relationships are important, they are the foundation to doing business. I don’t mean relationships in the “old sense,” but relationships earned through establishing trust and credibility with your customers, and the customer’s respect for the value created in the relationship. But somehow, I think relationships are too narrow. Too often, as I look at the relationships sales people build, they are narrowly focused. Too many sales people focus their efforts on too few people in the organization. Every sales person has their “buddy” in the account. It’s […]
Time Management, Some Thoughts
My friend, Anthony Iannarino, wrote a great post, The Key To Time Management, Stop Wasting It. It struck a chord, and I wanted to add a few thoughts. What are you stopping? As Anthony points out, we do all sorts of things, trying to figure out how we fit everything into our busy days. We find excuses to avoid the most critical, highest priority things. Often, we just get into bad habits. We do the same things we’ve always done–but because workloads have skyrocketed, we are just doing them in greater volume–struggling with keeping up. We continue to do the […]
Newton’s Third Law, Every Action Creates An Equal And Opposite Reaction
Many of you might be surprised, but I was actually trained as a physicist. One of the first things we learn in physics — even in high school are Newton’s Laws. One of the most quoted is Newton’s Third Law, Every Action Create An Equal And Opposite Reaction. Funny, I never really thought of Newton as a sales thought leader, but his third law helps us understand a lot of the challenges we face in engaging our customers. Customers don’t want to see sales people–it’s something all of us face. Perhaps it’s not because they don’t need to see sales people, but […]
Change, When Will We Put It Behind Us!?!@#!?
About a week ago, I participated in a conversation with a group of frustrated sales executives. Each was facing tremendous challenges in their businesses, all were struggling to deal with these issues and getting their teams performing. At one point in the discussions, one frustrated executive sighed, “We just need to get the changes behind us, so we can move on with our business!” Sometimes, I think each of us feels this way. We’d just like to get things back to normal. We want some sanity in our lives and organizations. We want to settle into our routines–but we face constant […]
Falling In Love With Our Products!
One of the nice things about sales people is we have tremendous passion about whatever it is we sell. We believe in our products, we cannot imagine anyone not being as enthusiastic as we are–or selecting an alternative solution. It’s impossible to imagine a sales person being successful without being excited about what we well. Entrepreneurs are similar, they are people driven by an unstoppable passion for what they are building. They can’t imagine anything other than their product or service. This passion and drive is exciting and contagious. Their whole lives are consumed with the products they create. This […]
Performance Management–A Question Of Leadership
I’m tough on sales, marketing, and business professionals. I have high expectations on how each of us performs. I’m proud of the professions of selling and marketing and constantly want to see improvement. In many posts in this blog, I’m critical of what we do, how we act, how we perform. We should constantly be seeking to perform at the highest levels possible. However, we are not alone in our responsibility and accountability to perform at the highest levels possible. Our direct managers are responsible and accountable for our performance, and leadership all the way up the food chain is […]