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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
Social Networking, Reciprocity, and Hypocrisy
I’ve always approached networking and social networking from the point of view of trying to build genuine relationships, trying to create value for people without a condition of reciprocity. For example, I tweet things I think are really interesting and may be interesting to my followers. I don’t do it with the expectation that someone might tweet my stuff. I “follow” people that I think have interesting views and hope that people follow me for the same reasons. But sometimes this means that I don’t follow everyone that follows me. It’s interesting to see my twitter followers go up and down. Clearly, a […]
Forensic Prospecting
Forensic Prospecting—I wish I could claim inventing this term, but the words popped out of the mouth of a client as we were discussing prospecting approaches. There’s an untapped gold mine of prospects that sales people overlook or take for granted. These are customers that have done business with us in the past—as far back as we can possibly imagine. We lose contact with too many customers–organizations and individuals, yet they represent a tremendous source of business to us. Many years ago, we undertook a series of surveys with about 10 clients–across a spectrum of industries. We looked at all the customers […]
Does LinkedIn Actually Impact Sales?
LinkedIn has become a powerful tool for all sales and business professionals. Yet many sales people and organizations are still confused about how to best leverage LinkedIn to product results — or even if it does drive results. My friend, Jill Konrath, has put together a survey on this issue. Jill intends to identify how top sales professionals are using LinkedIn, best practices that produce sales, and a number of other areas. She wants your input on this survey. Please take the time to take her survey, provide your experience and view, then look for the results! Just click on the […]
It’s The Customer’s Responsibility To Buy!
As sales people, we take our responsibility to sell very seriously–sometimes too seriously and we have a tendency to push or pressure the customer inappropriately. However seriously we take our responsibility to sell, it’s really meaningless until the customer accepts their responsibility to buy. But too often we forget this, getting frustrated ourselves, as well as aggravating the customer. There are lots of things that impact the customer and their buying. If they don’t have a need or desire to buy, we have to create that need and get them to own it for themselves. This is the focus of a lot […]
Executing Company Strategy
The sales organization is responsible for executing the company strategy with customers! No if, or’s, or but’s! But too often, I see sales people and managers failing to do this. They focus on the same old things—the same customers, the same segments, the same products. It’s natural human behavior, we sell what we are comfortable with to those customers we are comfortable with selling to. But company strategies are evolving. If companies want to grow, the strategy is simple. Develop and introduce new products to sell to our existing customers Sell our current products to new customers in new segments.—-“You […]
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 […]