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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
Relationships And Partnerships
In the past month, I’ve written some articles on Relationships and Partnering: “We Want To Be Your Partner,” , “Relationships Don’t Get You The Order,” and “On Collaboration and Partnering.” Also, my ebook, Creating Effective Strategic Partnerships, has stirred up some offline discussions. I’ve noticed some confusion in the concepts. Developing relationships is important in sales, business, and life. While there is some overlap in how we develop relationships and developing partnerships, they are not the same. As sales professionals, I think it’s important to be clear about what we are really trying to achieve. More importantly, I think it’s important […]
Patterns — Are We Recognizing Those That Help Us?
Our lives are dominated by patterns–some of them are habits. Patterns are the results of things we do or that are happening around us. For example, there may be certain things we do in certain circumstances, with certain people that create an outcome or result. Every time those things coincide in time, similar results happen. They could be great results, they could be bad results. Patterns are a part of everything we do, though we may not be conscious of them. Sometimes we talk about patterns as habits–good or bad. When we do certain things, they produce certain results. Great […]
How Well Do You Understand Your Customer’s Business?
We know our products, our competition, our companies well. But this isn’t what counts for our customers–sure they want sales people who understand the products they sell, but what they really want is sales people that understand them–their companies and businesses. Yet I’m constantly amazed how little too many sales people know about their customers. They know them at a surface level, but they don’t really understand them and their businesses. This keeps us at a distance and makes it difficult to really connect and engage our customers. It doesn’t take a lot of time to understand our customers’ businesses, […]
Performance Metric Friday–Ideal Pipeline Volume
For those regular readers, you know I’m a bit obsessive about metrics. I measure everything. I look at my business goals, my day to day activities, I measure my performance on my various athletic endeavors. Performance metrics are very powerful management tools, but I tend to focus on Personal Performance Metrics—things that help me manage my own performance, constantly improving. I’ve had a lot of requests from folks on various types of measures, and how they work. I’ve decided, until I run out of ideas (or until I bore you too much), that on Friday’s I’ll choose a different metric […]
Independent Sales Reps — A Powerful Channel
I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about independent sales reps recently. They are a terribly misunderstood and under-appreciated sales channel. Independent sales reps can be a solution to coverage and market access challenges, but only if we leverage them in a way that makes sense. I see too many organizations making too many mistakes in thinking about this channel. They do just about everything wrong, then complain about the independent rep, without understanding the channel was predestined to failure. The biggest error I see organizations make is transferring our cost and risk problem to the rep. Many organizations, particularly […]
Imitation May Be A Sincere Form Of Flattery, But It’s A Loser’s Strategy
It seems imitation is rampant, we’re surrounded by it. Often there seem to be more imitators–copy-ers than innovators and leaders. In the music world, we see all sorts of tribute bands. (I’m a fan of a Doors tribute band, Wild Child, –their lead singer is Dave Brock. I keep trying to convince folks that’s me playing Jim Morrison). These bands are great, but they never achieve the greatness of the bands they are imitating. They always be just what they are, facsimiles of the real thing. In the case of tribute bands, we know they are imitators so, as customers, […]