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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
Buyer Beware — Seller Be Aware!
I guess as a blogger, twitter user, and sometime pundit, it’s natural to get into a lot of conversations about the impact of Social Media, and the Internet for that matter, on buying and selling. In the past several days, I’ve had a number of conversations with people all over the world. “How do we leverage social media to sell?” “What should we be doing with social media?” “What is social selling?”I have to admit that I feel a little awkward in these discussions, I don’t by any means consider myself a social media expert—it seems, I’ve just learned how […]
Games Sales People Play — The Challenge Of Activity Metrics
A few weeks, ago, my post on The Most Used – Useless Metric In Sales created an avalanche of comments and emails. Many of you commented on a variety of “useless metrics” you have experienced. One of the most popular categories of “useless metrics” was Activity metrics. Activity metrics are very popular, they’re easy to establish and measure. There are all sorts of activity metrics: Number of outgoing/incoming phone calls handled per day/week, number of customer meetings per day/week, number of proposals, number of sales opportunities in the funnel — the list is endless. The problem with activity metrics is […]
I’ve Succumbed–I’m Talking About Sales 2.0
I’ve always hated the term, Sales 2.0. I don’t know what it means, to me it’s always a conversation about great new tools and software systems, but not really about selling. But I’ve succumbed. On Tuesday, August 24, 1:00 PM EDT, Tom Scontras, VP of Marketing for Glance Networks and I are having a discussion: Learn The 3 Keys To Making The Successful Shift to Sales 2.0! It would be great to have you join us in the discussion–click the link to register: Register. We’ll be talking about Sales 2.0 — as much as the whole concept bothers me. Why […]
Prisoners Of Our Own Experiences
I meet with executives everyday. They have great knowledge about their businesses–they can cite everything about their strategies, priorities, goals, key metrics. They study their competitors incessantly, understanding their strategies and positioning. They study their markets, and the best study their customers. They have deep insight about everything in their industry. But when I talk to them, a critical issue they always bring up is, “How do we innovate?” “How do we start thinking out of the box?” One of the problems with innovating and thinking out of the box is that we are prisoners of our own experience. Most of […]
Professional Salesperson — Business Professional?
The other day, I wrote an article, Appointments With Sales People Fall Short Of Executive Expectations. In it I cited data from a Forrester Research report on executive perspectives of sales people’s ability to understand their business needs, priorities, and issues. I wanted to extend the discussion, focusing on a topic I’ve found a little nebulous, business acumen. There are training programs on business acumen, programs that help you understand the structure of business, how they work. There are MBA programs many sales people take to understand more about how businesses operate. Those are all great, sales people should seek […]
Appointments With Sales People Fall Short Of Executive Expectations
Last Week I wrote about “We Have To Call At The Top,” suggesting the concept of right level selling. There are many times when calling at the “C” level is critical for our sales efforts, yet we struggle to get appointments with these executives. I was interested to read a Forrester Research report on this topic, presenting the executive perspective. Only 15% of the “C” level executives surveyed felt their meetings with sales people were valuable and lived up to their expectations. They went further, based on the outcome of the initial meeting, only 7% would accept follow-on meetings. No […]