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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 Future Of Selling — It’s Social
In April, OgilvyOne announced their World’s Greatest Salesperson contest. I wrote a blog post, The World’s Greatest Salesperson, that generated a huge amount of controversy, discussion, a number of blog posts on other sites. We were all in an uproar about OgilvyOne’s position on characteristics of the world’s greatest sales person. The folks at OgilvyOne were very gracious–they contacted me, we started talking quite a bit. It turns out they were starting to do some research on the Future Of Selling. I was flattered when they asked me to be one of their top 30 experts in helping them look […]
I’m Privileged To Work With Really Smart People!
As a preface, at this time of the year, we all have a tendency to reflect a little. It’s a chance to look back at the year and think a little about what has happened and to begin to establish plans to go forward. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about how privileged I am. Over the past years, I’ve had the great privilege of working with some of the most talented and smart people in the world—each of them dealing with very profound and difficult problems, balancing very difficult constraints. I really need to write this […]
“Me Too,” Is Not A Value Proposition!
A client called me up a couple of days ago with an interesting problem. They were in the closing stage of a very large deal. They had done a thoughtful job of understanding the customer business, their goals, the problems they were trying to address, and so forth. They had made a final presentation, it had included a good business analysis about the benefits the customer would get, and the value they should expect. They provided a good analysis including both hard and soft justification for their solution. After a few days, the customer cam back to my client saying, […]
Losing A Mentor
I just this moment learned of the passing of Mack Hanan. Mack passed away on November 25, in New York City. I first “got to know” Mack through his book, Consultative Selling. It was one of the first books I read on selling that really made sense to me. I read it in the mid 70″s when I was a young and eager IBM sales person. It’s a book I have always kept within arms reach and have referred to constantly through my career. As many of you who have followed me, I’ve always wondered why the principles Mack, Neil […]
Great Product, Lousy Service, No Sale!
Usually, I try to minimize my whining about poor sales and customer service experiences, however, every once in a while, I can’t help a short rant. Imagine this, a company has spent money trying to attract my interest in their online backup/synchronization service, they’ve sent appropriate emails, provided good marketing information. I spent some time on the phone with a sales person, making sure I understood what I was buying. She handled all my questions and concerns skillfully and politely. In the end, she asked if she had addressed all my concerns. I responded that I had, and agreed to subscribe to this servic and […]
Who’s Got Sales’ Back?
In today’s complex B2B sales environment, few sales people can afford to go it alone. Not only do sales people have to manage the customer side of the opportunity, they have to orchestrate the internal side of the opportunity. I’ve been having an interesting email conversation with Eric Koulourath of Invensys about this challenge. He’s presented very interesting discussions of the role of pre-sales as a vital part of the overall sales team. Many of the solutions we present are very complex, requiring management and coordination of a variety of internal resources–marketing, order management, perhaps implementation teams, even engineering or […]