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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 We Speaking The Customer’s Language?
Recently I was in China in a series of meetings with CEO’s of Chinese companies. The meetings were great, but we each struggled to maximize their impact. My Mandarin is very limited–basically to “Hello,” “Thank you,” and a couple of other words. Many of the executives spoke some English and were very polite in trying to communicate in a way that I could understand. Mostly we relied on an interpreter. The problem was, the interpreter interpreted the discussion–that is he describe things based on how he heard them, not necessarily what was intended. So we had to be very careful […]
If You Don’t Know Where You Are Going, Any Road Will Get You There
A well known saying, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” I’d like to add a corollary, “It helps to pay attention to the signposts.” Yes, this is a post about establishing and executing plans. Whether it’s a plan to win a deal, to make a high impact sales call, to maximize your share within the account or territory, to make your quota, to hire the right people…… For all of these, we maximize our effectiveness and the quality of the result by having well defined goals and strategies in place, and refining our […]
Customer And Market Transitions Wait For No One
I was struck by this comment from John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, ” We got knocked on our tail last year. Market transitions wait for no one. The ability to recognize and move on these is critical. If we don’t change, we won’t make it through these transitions and if you don’t change you won’t either. It’s happening at a faster pace in every industry.” We all talk about how our customers are changing–what they do, how they buy, their expectations of suppliers is changing. No business or individual can afford to stand still and survive. Every organization is constantly […]
What’s In It For The Person Paying The Bill?
I received a frustrated email from a colleague the other day. He described a sales situation—he’s selling a solution that creates a tremendous return for this customer. The return is about 4 times the investment — a business case that seems compelling on the surface. But he’s frustrated because he can’t close the deal. It’s actually a situation B2B sellers encounter quite frequently. We develop great business cases for “The Customer,” a company or an enterprise. But the reality often is, the value or the return accrues to one department or group, and all the cost and risk accrues to […]
Five Conditions Your Sales Process Must Satisfy
A strong sales process is critical to our effectiveness as sales professionals. Without a strong process, it’s comparable to an aimless walk—we may reach our destination, but then again we may not. Or we may reach our destination after an overly long journey. As much as has been written about sales processes, I am constantly amazed by the number of organization that either have no process in place, their process is hopelessly outdated, or the sales people and managers don’t use the process. We can never achieve the highest levels of performance without a process. So since our goal is […]
Learning From Our Subordinates
One of the key roles of any leader or executive is to teach, coach, develop our people. Our people are all too eager to learn from our experience, to learn what we did to be successful, as well as to learn what mistakes we may have made, so they can avoid them. “Teaching,” whether formally or through coaching or mentoring is a privilege for any executive. It’s a powerful way, not only to work on specific skills development, but to pass along values, to build the culture, to provide our people a broader context in which to position their contributions. In […]