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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
Only One Thing Is Sacrosanct To Sales
Mid-year is approaching. I’m talking to a lot of people about where they are with quota performance. With too many, their hands start waving around, the stories start, the excuses start. “We’re still seeing the effects of the economy, customers aren’t buying….” I know their peers in the same company are making the numbers, their competitors are selling, so I wonder. “Our marketing programs and collateral are really insufficient, I don’t have the tools I need to be successful…” Again, there are a number of their peers faced with the same thing who don’t let this stop them. “”We just […]
Creating Crap At The Speed Of Light
There are a huge number of tools available to help sales professionals be more effective and efficient. Properly used and implemented they can have a profound impact in improving sales performance. At the same time, used improperly, the provide the potential of causing great problems or creating crap at the speed of light. Every tool has the opportunity, properly used to have great impact or improperly used to have great negative impact. Too often, however, it seems the implementation of the tool in itself, is the end rather than just a means. People implement CRM thinking “because we have CRM, […]
Pattern Recognition And The Sales Process
The human brain is an awesome instrument! One of the things it enables us to do, sometimes almost unconsciously, is to instantly recognize patterns. We encounter a situation, in nano seconds, our brains compare the situation with others we have encountered through our life. It quickly enables us to recognize, “I’ve encountered something like this before—-this is how I recognized it, this is what I did, this is what happened as a result.” We do it thousands of times a day, comparing everything we have encountered, looking for common patterns that have produced successful outcomes, then acting based on our […]
How Easy Are You To Do Business With?
I have to admit, I’m writing this out of a little bit of frustration. I have a prospect, it’s virtually impossible to communicate with them — at least through the normal channels. Now, you may say, “Dave, don’t you get it–they don’t want to talk to you!” But they really do want to talk and communicate with me. They say so, they get upset when it appears that I’m not communicating with them. They originally contacted me a couple of months ago. I got an email from a mid level executive in the company. He wanted some information, I responded–rather […]
Media Business In Trouble
The media business is changing. Traditional media–newspapers, journals, and magazines are struggling to refine their business models. Figuring out how to make money and continue to grow is a challenge for all in the media business. As a consumer of both traditional and new media, I want to see them survive, grow, and thrive. I subscribe to a lot of “traditional” media as well as new media. One of the great trends I see is publishers adopting “any time, any place, any device.” For example I can read some of my favorite newspapers in hard copy, or, when I’m not home, […]
“Have I Got A Deal For You!”
The phone rang, I picked it up. The voice on the other end went into it’s pitch, “Hi, I’m so and so. Would you be interested if you could invest in a stock that could give you a cud-jillion-billions return in 60 days?” Yes, it was one of those pointless boiler-room calls. But is was a slow day, I was a little bored, so I decided to have fun. “Yes, I’d actually be very interested in getting that kind of return. However, before you go further, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?” I could hear […]