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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
Taking Shortcuts
We all take shortcuts. We want to find the path of least resistance, we want to get to the goal in the shortest time possible. It’s natural human behavior. Too often, however, the shortcuts we take are the wrong ones. It’s too hard to research a company and individual before a prospecting call, so we just call and talk about the only thing we know–ourselves and our products. We’re pressed for time, so we don’t prepare for a sales call–we shoot from the lip, after all, we’ve made hundreds of calls before. It takes a lot of time to develop […]
“Can We Collaborate?”
To be fair to my readers, this is a rant, if you aren’t prepared for my whining, you may want to forego this post. It seems everything these days has to be a “collaboration.” Rather selling our customers something, we look to collaborate or partner. When we want something from someone else, it’s a collaboration. In establishing a new relationship, we immediately want to collaborate. I must field at least a dozen emails or phone calls, each week, with someone or some organization that wants to collaborate with my company. When I respond to the call, I come to learn […]
Interruption Based Selling!
I’ve been following a discussion on cold calling. The topic of “Interruption Based Selling” came up, with several people taking strong stands against this. Frankly, I think it’s our obligation to “Interrupt”–particularly if we want to create real value for our customers. Waiting for the customer to reach out, waiting for the customer to recognize a need is often too late–both for the customer and most of the time for sales. Our customers are just like everyone else. They’re incredibly busy just doing their jobs. They are consumed with keeping things going. They don’t have the time, or may not […]
Making The Time To Sell
Virtually everything we do can be recovered. We make a bad call, we can fix it and recover from it, we lose a deal, we can learn from it and win the next ten deals. The one thing we can’t recover is time–once we’ve spent it, it’s lost, we can’t re-do it, we can’t recover it. So it’s critical we manage our time to maximize our impact and effectiveness. If our job is to sell—to acquire new business, orders, and revenue; then clearly we want to maximize the time available to sell (as well as maximize our effectiveness for the […]
Sales Performance Management—Effectiveness And Efficiency
As sales professionals and sales leaders, we are constantly focused on achieving the highest levels of performance. We have to constantly improve–performance that was outstanding five years ago is deficient now. What is outstanding today will become uncompetitive in the future. Implementing performance improvement initiatives, continuing to improve and innovate is very difficult. Sometimes, in looking at sales performance improvement, it’s important to break it into a couple of components: Are we being as effective as possible? Are we being as efficient as possible? Sales effectiveness generally focuses on are we doing thing in the best possible way? Are we […]
What The Numbers Mean, Hints For Coaching!
As sales professionals, we’re all very goal directed and measurement oriented. Managers leverage numbers heavily in managing and coaching performance. But there’s a fine line in using the numbers appropriately in coaching. Too often, coaching becomes about the numbers and not about what they mean. The real secret to effective coaching is understanding is causing the results, getting underneath the numbers. Most of the time the number are just symptoms of something else–an underlying problem of challenge.. None of us would feel comfortable if a doctor just treated our symptoms, rather than examining and trying to understand what creates those […]