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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
Stop Solving Your Customers’ Problems!
As sales consultative sales professionals, we focus on solving our customers’ problems. We qualify customers by finding those with problems they want to solve, focus on identifying their pain and needs, then propose how our solution addresses those better than any others. And our competitors seek to do the same. But we have a much greater opportunity to create value and develop deeper relationships with our customers. It’s through helping them discover opportunities—things that can make them more efficient or effective, things that improve their ability to serve their customers, things that help them grow and expand. Our customers have […]
Dynamic Business Week — A Don’t Miss Event
Next week, June 14-18, Microsoft and Focus.com are sponsoring an exciting event: Dynamic Business Week! It’s a virtual conference, bringing thousands of business professionals together to talk about issues critical to growth, productivity and success. The conference will be an important opportunity to understand Social Customer Relationship Management and the potential it can bring in helping customers, sellers, and marketers connect. The conference has an outstanding list of speakers, including: Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Solutions Division, Paul Greenburg, Scott Albro-of Focus.com, Kirill Tatarinov, Mike Ehrenberg, Joshua Greenbaum, Mike Gannotti, Marty Collins, Ardath Albee (one of my favorites), Myra […]
To Get Monstrous Results, Are Our Customers Prepared For Monstrous Change?
I was having a conversation with close friend this morning. He was expressing frustration with a customer not moving forward on a particular deal. At the height of his frustration, my friend said: “We can have such a Monstrous Impact on the customer, why won’t they go through this Change?” As we drilled down, quickly we discovered the customer agreed the impact could be tremendous, but the change was also Monsterous. Their reality was they were so focused on the day to day activities that regardless how compelling the benefit they could achieve, they chose to ignore it. The other […]
Applying My Lessons In Martial Arts To Professional Selling
About 6 months ago, I started taking lessons in a couple of martial arts, Tai Chi and Kung Fu. It’s been a tremendously interesting and frustrating experience. Progress seems very slow, I feel as though I am still in the “Wax-On, Wax-Off David-san” stage. Can’t wait to get to the painting the fence part. A few things have really struck me (pardon the pun) through the lessons. They strike me as important lessons to apply to sales–and indeed many aspects of business. Being in the moment: I’ve learned to clear my mind, focusing on being the moment. The moment I […]
Jill Konrath’s SNAP Selling Does Not Belong On Your Bookshelf!
Jill Konrath’s new book, SNAP Selling, does not belong on your bookshelf! Before Jill kills herself or me, let me clarify things. SNAP Selling belongs on your desk–within arm’s reach. It should be dog-earred, book marked, highlighted, and annotated. SNAP Selling should be your daily guide and reminder about how to thrive in the new world of professional selling. We live in a new world, it’s not the economy that’s created this–a change has been building for a number of years. The way people buy is changing profoundly, except too many sales people haven’t woken up to this, employing the same tired […]
How Do We Find The Time To Coach Our Sales People?
Everyone recognizes the importance of coaching sales people, but it just doesn’t get done. In a survey of several hundred sales managers, we found sales managers “coached” their sales people 1 time per quarter or less! Based on this, a sales person is lucky if they get 4 coaching sessions per year. Clearly, this is a problem. Coaching needs to happen every day, but everyone is busy and time-poor. How do busy managers and sales people find the time for coaching and development? One of the problems with coaching is many people confuse coaching with the performance review. While coaching […]