Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Sales Process 2010, Are You Positioned To Perform?
Yes, I’m on that soapbox again. There have been a number of research reports released, all highlighting the decline in sales performance. CSO Insights, 2009 Sales Optimization report is one that you should look at. It’s disappointing, but not surprising. My friend, Dave Stein wrote an interesting perspective, Declining Sales Performance: Have You Had Enough Yet? In many ways, the decline is understandable, though not excusable. We are in the midst of overwhelming and rapid change, it’s difficult just keeping our noses above the water. Customers are changing the way they buy, social media is making information (accurate or not, […]
Dear Occupant, I Value Our Relationship…..
I got this piece of LinkedIn Spam: Hello , I’d like to connect to you to on my professional network on LinkedIn. I am a LinkedIn LION with over 4,500+ connections currently. I would be happy to connect so that we can mutually expand our network of potential contacts. Unfortunately LinkedIn has restricted the number of invitations I am able to send, so I am pushed to expand this way. My profile is at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/Mr. X If you are unable to open the above link just go to people search and put Mr. X. Please feel free to send an invitation, I […]
Are You Earning Great Referrals? Are You Leveraging Them?
Referrals are critical for every sales professional. No amount of cold calling will surpass the power of a great referral. Yet most of us are pretty bad about nurturing and developing our customers as great referral resources. Recently, I took the time to read Paul McCord’s “Creating A Million Dollar A Year Sales Income, Sales Success Through Client Referrals.” I thought I had been doing a pretty good job in doing this myself, but I learned a lot from Paul’s book. Paul creates a comprehensive process that ranges from setting expectations with customers on referrals, through earning referrals, getting the […]
Rethinking The Customer Buying Experience
I’m a great fan of Customer Experience Design. Unfortunately, most of the work in customer experience design tends to be focused on web design, user interfaces and product design. There is some interesting Design Thinking work being done in business process/strategy. I think as sales professionals we need to rethink the Customer Buying Experience. Actually, it’s already being done, but, it’s being designed without us! Social media and networking create means by which customers are already redesigning their buying experiences. Axel Schultze wrote an outstanding article, Sales Process 2010, that outlined much of this. Social media isn’t the only place we are seeing […]
Stop Being Stupid! The Customer Isn’t Always Right
This morning, I was intrigued by a question on LinkedIn. A person felt offended, a salesperson had criticized the this individual’s company. The individual was very upset, complaining to the sales person’s management, and posing the question on LinkedIn asking whether anyone else had experienced sales people being impolite and criticizing the customer to the customer and how to handle it. I don’t know about this specific situation and whether the sales person was offensive or presenting a different point of view to the customer. It did remind me of an experience a number of years ago. I was with […]
Is Sales A Blood Sport?
I’ve been having an off line discussion on competitiveness and agressiveness in selling. In the discussion, terms like “sales is a Blood Sport,” or “sales by it’s nature is Predatory.” This kind of terminology disturbs me deeply. Unfortunately, I this is too prevalent. Just ask people to talk about sales people, most of the words have to do with pushy, only care about themselves, liars, deceitful, and the list goes on. The reputation of sales people, in the hierarchy of life is just above pond scum. Perhaps only lawyers hold a lower place in people’s minds. Sales professionals do nothing […]