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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
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 […]
Before You Pick Up The Phone!
I’m constantly amazed at the calls I get. People calling me, with little idea about who I am, what I do, what my company does. I see this from sophisticated people in large organizations to those people dialing for dollars. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not my ego speaking, but I’m a really easy person to research. Do a Google query, a lot of stuff about me pops up to the top or near the top. In LinkedIn, there’s a complete profile with links to my blog, my company’s web site, and twitter. So it’s really easy to find out about […]
Does Every Review Become A Deal Review??
I sit in hundreds of review sessions every year. Pipeline reviews, territory reviews, account reviews, opportunity reviews, call reviews. An odd thing happens in about 90% of the reviews, they all become deal reviews. Think about the last pipeline review you participated in. It starts out with a review of the pipeline, pretty soon, someone–perhaps the manager, perhaps a participant, perhaps the sales person doing the review, focuses on a particular deal. All of a sudden the conversation shifts and becomes a deal review. Seldom do we get back to reviewing the pipeline, if we do, it’s only for a […]
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 […]