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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
You, Your Products, and Your Company Suck!
It’s Friday afternoon, the end of an incredibly busy week, I’m taking a few moments to reflect on some of the most interesting discussions of the week. With several clients, and some of my good friends, including Keith Bossey, John Cousineau, Jim Keenan, and Jonathan Farrington, I’ve found myself in discussions about handling serious, often critical, and sometimes impolite customer feedback or objections. One of the greatest challenges sales professionals face is engaging our customers. We try but can’t catch their attention or gain their interest in our offerings. Then suddenly some feedback comes in, often some variant of “your […]
A Great Sales Process – Elegant In Its Simplicity, Natural In Execution
In response to my post, But We Have A Sales Process…., Dave Stein wrote a great post, More Excuses For Not Doing The Right Thing About Sales Effectiveness. It’s a great post about excuses he hears for not having or following a sales process. Please make sure you read it. I also got some very interesting comments, both on this blog and in other places my articles are posted. An issue that came up multiple times is “how to we have a sales process without having a lot of bureaucracy?” The question reminded me of a lot of things I […]
But We Have A Sales Process……..
A couple of weeks ago, I was on a panel with a number of peers. A couple of the panelists suggested the majority of companies they worked with had no sales process in place. I have a slightly different point of view, one that is perhaps worse news. Most of the organizations I work with have a sales process in place. At least that’s what they say. They’ll even pull out a piece of paper, a flow chart, or show me their CRM system to prove they have a sales process. I’m always curious, so I ask a lot of […]
Sales, Just Like Riding A Bike!
Those of you who know me know that I am a fanatic road bike rider. Naturally, I rode bikes a lot as a kid, and rode at college because it was the easiest way of getting around. But then I stopped. About 4 years ago, I started riding again–mainly to try to get into some semblance of shape. Part of what they say about riding bikes is true–you don’t forget. I live in Southern California–on any given weekend, you’ll see 100’s of people out on bicycles. When I started riding again, I noticed, that even though I could ride a […]
Caring About Your Customer–The Ultimate Differentiator
I was read a great post written by my friend Charles H. Green, Why Client Focus Can’t Be About Profits. It’s outstanding, be sure to read it. Regular readers will know that I spend a lot of time working with organizations on Value Propositions. In the past 18 months, I’ve written over 40 articles related to this topic. Charlie’s post reminded me that I hadn’t written about one of the most important things about value propositions. To tell you the truth, I assumed we all knew about this and just never wrote about it. Thanks to Charlie for the reminder. […]
Which Came First, The CRM System Or The Salesperson?
Last week, I took the time to attend SalesForce.com’s meeting: DreamForce ’09. As a geek, I felt like a kid in a candy store–so many Shiny New Toys! But as I wandered the sessions, I felt a strange sense of disconnect. I kept struggling with, “what’s it mean to me, the sales person?” There were lots of very interesting sessions about new features and functions, shiny new capabilities, lot’s more to tie me to my computer–entering or consuming data. Because it’s SalesForce.com, there was a constant battle cry about “the cloud.” I have to admit, from the point of view […]