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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
What’s The Diagnosis?
My wife hates going to Doctors—I actually think that’s a basic intelligence test, I don’t think anyone likes going to Doctors. It’s impossible to get appointments, costs are skyrocketing, and the experience–well, I’ll stop there. About 6 weeks ago, I noticed her limping, so I asked if she was having problems with her leg or foot. She said she’d tripped earlier in the morning when she was on the golf course and her foot was bothering her. We both thought it would go away, ignored it for a few days, but then the pain was getting worse. I said, “Go […]
Metrics Matter, But Which Ones?
As sales people, we’re certainly familiar with metrics. There are all sorts of measures that are supposed to help us set priorities and drive our behaviors. The king of all metrics, hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles is quota–revenue, orders, whatever. Then we may have all sorts of other metrics. There may be activity metrics like the number of phone calls we need to make, the number of deals we have to have in our pipelines, and so forth. Sometimes, we have so many metrics, it’s difficult to determine which we should focus on, so we just do […]
It Still Is All About Implementation And Execution!
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been engaged in a “discussion,” that is really more about “Mine is bigger and better than yours.” This particular discussion started with what I thought was the SEB’s particularly ill constructed argument that “Solution Selling Is Dead.” My purpose in this article is not to perpetuate that discussion. If you are curious, read my blog post–but more importantly read the comment stream. Unfortunately, we see and participate in those discussions too often. And too often, I think they miss the things that are most important to our customers. We get into discussions about methodology—and if we […]
The New “Office,” And Work Life
Perhaps dating myself, when I first started selling about 30 years ago, my business life was basically centered around my office and my customer locations. I was fortunate enough to have two offices–a cube in the bull pen at my company, one at my largest customer’s location. Most of my “work” was centered on those locations (Well, OK, I did spend a lot of time at Harry’s of Hanover Square). My day would usually start at my office at the customer. I’d meet with customers through the day. I’d wrap up the day in my office at my company–usually to research […]
Sales Management SOP
The other day I wrote about the “Almost Perfect Sales Management Article.” That post stimulated a flurry of questions about a Sales Management Standard Operating Process/System. I though I’d start to address that here. There are a few key building blocks to the Sales Management/Leadership Process. They are tightly interrelated–that is none can exist in isolation and all must be in place to drive the highest levels of performance both of the Sales Leadership team and the organization. The building blocks are: Leadership Overall Sales Strategy Business Management People Coaching Within each of these major building blocks there are a […]
Creating Excuses To Keep Going Back To The Customer
I was in a fascinating discussion the other day. We are talking about “conventional sales wisdom,” (which I would retitle, Stupid Techniques We All Feel For). The topic of conversation was, “How do we create excuses to keep coming back to the customer? How do we keep the door open for yet another meeting?” There were all sorts of techniques I recall being taught in my early sales training. Take them a piece of collateral, a case study, anything that would provoke another meeting or discussion. References–rather than anticipating the need for references and bringing them to a meeting, use the […]