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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
Paying Attention
The other day, I was returning to the office from a meeting. The drive was a little more than an hour, so I started making calls. After a few calls, I suddenly looked around–I’d missed my exit and had driven about 5 miles further than I should have. All of a sudden I thought, “How did I get here?” In this world of hyper activity, impacting every aspect of our business and personal lives; I think we often find ourselves in the situation of “How did I get here?” We get caught up in meeting after meeting, constantly being interrupted […]
Quantity Or Quality
For those of you that follow me, you may think, “Here’s Dave ranting about quality again.” Not so fast—-the answer quantity or quality may not be that obvious. In reality both quantity and quality are important in sales. Developing and sharply executing the highest quality sales strategies, having very high win rates is meaningless if you aren’t chasing enough opportunities to achieve your goals. Quantity is important, we have to be identifying and competing in a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve our goals. We have to be prospecting at a level that enables us to qualify enough opportunities. There’s […]
On Collaboration And Partnering
More than ever before, collaboration and partnering are critical to business success and sales. Internal collaboration–marketing, sales, customer service — all working together to grow the business; external collaborations–working with channel and business partners in reaching customers; collaborative relationships with customer–becoming a trusted advisor in facilitating their buying processes. Yet the data on collaboration and partnering is very bleak. Many internal efforts at collaboration fail, projects start but never finish or fail to achieve their objectives. Often internal collaborations leave organizations worse off than if they never collaborated at all. Data on external collaborations and partnering is even more dismal […]
Relationships Don’t Get You The Order!
Before you misunderstand, relationships are very important in sales. If everything else is equal, I’d much prefer to have a deep relationship in any competitive sales situation. So I don’t want to diminish the importance of building and maintaining strong relationships. The issue, though, is everything else is never equal. Unfortunately, I think too many people focus only primarily on the relationship. I read a comment in a discussion that made me cringe: “…successful sales depends on relationships, it’s not a matter of ‘productivity’ in terms of calls made, appointments set……” I couldn’t imagine a statement that is more wrong. […]
What Would Your Customer Say?
A major part of what I do for a living is to help individuals and organizations improve their performance and sales effectiveness. I participate in a lot of meetings where I’m asked to review the sales effectiveness initiatives of organizations. These people are very bright, extremely capable and have tremendous backgrounds in selling. The initiatives they talk about are always very interesting. There’s a huge amount of logic behind what they are trying to do. They support their initiatives with great data, and sometimes the expert views of other consultants. I sit in these reviews, I’m buying into what they are […]
It’s Not About The Questions, It’s The Conversation
There’s a huge amount of discussion about questions in selling. Entire books have been written about questions and questioning, questions are the focus of all sorts of training programs and fodder for thousands of blog posts (a few of which I’ve written myself). But questions aren’t the fundamental issue–conversations are. Questions are an important part of establishing a conversation, but I think focusing on questions creates an imbalance and may, in fact, detract from our ability to have conversations. What’s critical in sales is establishing meaningful, high impact conversations with customers. Those conversations are an exchange of information, ideas, opinions, […]