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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
Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness — Well Almost!
I always appreciate Tibor Shanto’s blog posts on cleaning out the pipeline, focusing on real business. He always seems to find the right time to remind us to do this, In January, he encouraged us to Clear Out The Clutter, can’t start the New Year with garbage in our funnel. In March, he reminded us of Spring Cleaning. I’ve been anxiously waiting his third quarter post and reminder. I agree with Tibor, over the course of time, sales people tend to let their pipelines get cluttered. Opportunities that looked good a couple of months ago are languishing. Deals we hoped […]
Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
A few years ago, I was talking to a sales manager. He was expressing some frustration, “I’m doing my job of selling, my customers need to start doing a better job of buying!” When you think about it, there’s actually a lot of truth to that statement — at least the “doing a better job of buying” part. Our customers do a bad job of buying because they don’t know how to buy. With the exception of purchasing professionals, it’s not our customers jobs to buy, they focus on doing their jobs whether it is building products, running an operation, […]
We Have To Call At The Top!
Conventional sales “wisdom” encourages us to “call at the top.” Sales people constantly seek the “C-Level” executives, looking for anyone that has a “Chief” in their title–surprisingly customers are accommodating us with CMO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s and so forth. We’re taught to call at the top–things move faster, we don’t have to worry about all the users, just find the top executive, pitch them, and everything will go fast. I often coach sales people on their deal strategies. Always, I hear, “We need to figure out a way to get to the CIO,” or “If only we could get to the […]
So Much Has Changed, So Much Is The Same
This past week, in New York, I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Mack Hanan. Mack is the author of Consultative Selling, originally published in 1970. Whenever I’m in New York, Mack and I get together to talk about the state of the profession. I started my sales career in the late 70’s. In that time, so much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same. Customers were busy then–they are still very busy. Though, in reality, I do think they are busier today than in the late 70’s. Continued cutback’s, the “leaning” of organizations, fewer resources–in hindsight, […]
I Don’t Have Time For Social Media!
The other day I was having dinner with a close friend. He’s the President of a division of a company. Eventually, the conversation got around to social media (is it something about me?). He said, “Dave, I just don’t get it, you keep talking about social media and how important it is, but I just don’t get it, I don’t have time for it, my customers aren’t using it. As we continued our conversation, he started saying, “I don’t have time to blog, I don’t have time to read blogs—even yours—and I really like your stuff (my ego was bruised […]
Reinforce And Enhance Your Sales Training With Product Training
The other day, my friend Kelley Robertson wrote an outstanding article: Is Your Sales Training Putting Your Sales Team At Risk? The article prompted me to think about: Why is product and sales training separated? What would happen if we integrated our sales methodologies and training into our product training? Companies invest lots of time and money in developing product training with every new product they launch. Usually, this training focuses on training the sales person on the product features, functions, speeds and feeds. Often, it includes competitive positioning, sometimes it includes elementary objection handling. Usually the training focuses on what […]