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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
Doubling Sales Productivity — Be Prepared!
Improving sales productivity is the Holy Grail of all sales professionals, executives, Sale 2.0 solution providers and every sales consultant. We look for all sorts of tools and mechanisms to improve productivity. Sometimes, it becomes very gimmicky. Maybe we are making it too complicated. I was apalled in reading IDC’s Sales Enablement Service’s recent survey of IT Buyers. In this survey, 54% of IT Buyers said sales people were unprepared for their initial customer meetings. For those seeking a silver lining, the 2010 survey indicated 54% were unprepared versus 57% for the 2009 survey. Nothing to be proud of. While […]
What’s The Future Of Buying?
To say things are changing is almost trite, with the confluence of the new economy, globalization, social media, globalization, new and different competition, new and different growth opportunities, we must rethink everything we do in business. For some time, I have been thinking, reading, researching, and talking a lot about the future of selling. Where are we going as a profession? What’s the next step function change in how we sell and create value for our customers? What are the critical skills, processes, methods and tools we need to embrace to perform at a higher level? There have been some […]
Please Mr/Ms Customer, Let Me Waste Your Time, I’ve Earned It!
Last week, I wrote about inspirational customer service. This weekend, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. I went out looking for new cars. No blog is long enough to contain my rant on how disfunctional the process of buying a car is, so I won’t go through the whole thing, but focus on a few low points-and not the lowest, I have to keep this reasonably civil. On Saturday, I went to look for a new car, I had settled on 4 different models, done my research, knew what I wanted in each and what a fair price might be. […]
Inspirational Moments In Customer Service
All too often, we hear nightmares about customer service and how abysmal it is. No one listens, no one cares, they just want to take our money and screw the customer. It’s great fodder for cocktail party and bloggers. Overlay this with the news reports on Toyota and their lack of responsiveness to customer complaints about problems, it’s no wonder no wonder we are terribly cynical about customer service. However, just when cynicism starts to take over, all of a sudden, we experience these moments of absolute surprise that enable cause us to pause and reflect. Customer service is not […]
Collaboration Is More Than A Web-Conference
I was listening to a web-conference today, one of the speakers discussed the importance of collaboration in sales, citing the higher use of web conferencing, webinars, Webex, and other tools. While I have great respect for the speaker, I wanted to scream! Absolutely, collaboration is critical to sales, and business, professionals. It’s always been important, new forms of collaboration are increasingly important. But web conferencing , webinars, Webex are not collaboration — they have little to do with collaboration! Effective collaboration is about alignment of goals and objectives. It’s about working together, perhaps in different ways than we have in […]
Do Great Sales People Make Great Sales Managers?
Do great sales people make great sales managers? This is a debate that never seems to end, I’ve written about it before, over the past few weeks, I don’t know how many posts I read about the topic. There is a real problem, too many times, we take great sales people and move them into sales management roles. Some succeed, some fail. Move anyone into any management job, some succeed, some fail. The real issues are: Do we know what skills, capabilities, experiences, and mentality do we want in a sales manager? Do we have a profile of what the ideal […]