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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
The Importance Of Push And Pull In Sales
There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull. I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels. It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process. Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided. Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a […]
Hearing What We Want To Hear
Sales people are eternally optimistic–it’s a great strength of sales people and critical. After all, we get a lot of “no’s,” if we let them stop us, we would never achieve anything. Yet sometimes our optimism is our downfall. We tend to accept things that fit “our picture,” not challenging them. We tend to listen selectively, hearing what we want to hear, not necessarily hearing what is really being said. I see this all the time. I’m conducting a deal review, the salesperson reviews what’s going on, but something doesn’t ring right. I often say, “this really doesn’t make sense, […]
Not Worth The “Paper It’s Written” On
Companies spend billions of dollars each year in training people on sales and related methodologies. Billions more are spent on tools like CRM systems and others that help improve sales people’s effectiveness and efficiency. Yet much of that is simply wasted. Too often, sales people simply don’t use the tools that have been implemented. For example, virtually every sales methodology has some sort of oppotunity planning or strategy process, or account planning process, or call planning process. Most of the CRM tools have capabilities to enter opportunity, account, territory plans. Too often, I get involved in an assessment of an […]
It’s The New Year For Our Customers, As Well!
As we put together our strategies for the New Year, most of our focus will be on ourselves–what are our quotas, how do we earn the most money, what are the expectations of us in the coming year? We have kick-off meetings to go to, new initiatives, new priorities, a lot of stuff. Much of January is spent focusing on our company and what we and the organization needs to achieve. But as sales people, we have an opportunity, our customers are undertaking the same exercise, they are doing the same things with their sales people and with everyone in […]
Performance Management Friday — New Year Baggage
It’s the end of the year. The New Year often represent a time for a fresh start. We have new goals and quotas. New initiatives and priorities will be launched in each of the thousands of Kickoff meetings that occur around the world. We may have committed to some New Year’s resolutions. Yet, it’s really only a New Year from the point of view of the calendar. We each come into the New Year with a lot of baggage. Deals in process, all the things that were on our to-do lists that haven’t gotten to done. With the New Year, […]
Looking For Ideas In All The Wrong Places
Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas. They are driven for improvement and innovation. But too often, our efforts are stymied. It’s hard to improve or innovate. Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places. When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?” Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!” Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.” When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel: “Ideas […]