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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
Why Every Marketer/Sales Person Should Read Richard Feynman’s Lectures On Physics
I spend most of my time working with high technology companies. I’ve been involved in technology most of my career and if pressed, have to admit I’m a bit of a geek. Part of my interest in technology may stem from the fact that by education I’m a physicist and engineer. One of the challenging things in working with technology companies is that we seem to revel in our complexity. The more syllables our words have the better. New acropnyms and buzzwords are things of beauty. Every presentation has to have dozens of slides that present every feature, function and […]
“I Can’t Get Customers To See Me!”
When I speak to sales people, this is the second biggest complaint I hear. Sales people have trouble getting meetings. This isn’t just with prospects, but also with customers we know well. Let’s face it, everyone is time-poor. Everyone has more on their plates than they can possibly deal with, and the pile just gets bigger. In the face of customers being time-poor, in order to get a meeting, we have to have a compelling reason for them to invest their precious time in us. This probably bears repeating with emphasis: In order to get a meeting, we have to […]
Should We Expect Ethical Conduct In Social Media?
Twitter is an important element of our social media and overall marketing strategy. I try to find outstanding content to point my followers to and am proud of the reputation I’ve established as a person that provides “tweets” of value. Recently, I’ve noticed people copying my tweets and sending them out as their own. At first, I thought they had eliminated the RT @davidabrock because then they would be over 140 characters. When I am RT’ing, I sometimes find that a challenge and have to eliminate some people–but never the original provider. I always feel bad about it, but I […]
Sales Management—Managing The Contradictions
A little over a week ago, I wrote Sales Management, It’s About Inspecting The Process, Not Transactions. In talking to many people who contacted me about the article, we ended up talking about the confict sales managers face in doing their jobs. Yes, we are supposed to inspect the process, but at the same time, we need to focus on deals and specifics. Well, that’s life, sales management is about managing the contradictions. The only way we will be successful in managing the organization is to focus on inspecting the process, coaching and developing your people, and managing the overall […]
We Have It All Wrong When We Think About Sales Training
A colleague was recently sharing research on how people learn. The data was very interesting and, perhaps, explains why we don’t get the results we expect from sales (or other) training programs. She shared this data: 10% of learning comes through formal training programs, 20% comes through observation and feedback, and the remaining 70% of learning comes through real world experience. Interesting stuff! As I reflected on the challenges we face in sales training, it would seem we focus too much time and too many dollars on the part of the issue that has the smallest impact on learning. I […]
What Would Happen If We Saw Things The Way Our Customers Saw Them?
Most of the organizations I work with are very high performance organizations. They have great products, great sales people, and provide solutions that can have great impact on their customers. However, in meeting with them, I often hear, “Our customers just don’t get it, they don’t see the impact we produce! How do we get them to better understand?” The challenge, time after time, is that we have great products that solve important customer problems. But we express those problems that we solve in our terms—using our language. Because we are sophisticated it has to include at least one really […]