Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
I have to admit to being a little bit more than impatient–my wife says I have to be more tolerant. But there are conversations that just drive me up the wall—-“We’ll just wait it out” is one of those conversations that drives me crazy. Over the past couple of years, I’ve heard that about the economy, “Things will get back to normal, we’ll have to wait it out.” But I hear it about all sorts of thing—major changes within a company; we don’t have the right products now, but new products are around the corner; our customer is going to […]
Read MoreEveryone in sales knows that it’s important to know your customer. Sales people keep all sorts of information, both on individuals and the enterprises. We know about the likes and dislikes of the people we sell to–those that we deal with every day. We know their birthdays, families, what schools they went to, whether they like golf, what their careers have been, and much more. We know about the companies–how they use our products, what the company makes and manufactures. We usually know their competitors and possibly know about their financial performance. We know about a lot of stuff about […]
Read MoreMy friend Skip Anderson wrote an outstanding post, “The Race To Sale Competence, A Case For Sales Training.” He raises a critical issue: As sales managers, are we so focused on managing expense that we lose sight of the opportunity? Skip speaks to the issue that many sales managers fail to invest in sales training, consequently lose the opportunity to increase revenues and sales success. I see this in too many aspects of business. Managers have become focused on managing expense, not managing opportunity and the inherent risks. Managing expense is important–but it’s easy. In the words of Nancy Reagan, […]
Read MoreThe phone rings, it’s a concerned executive. After pleasantries, we get down to the issues. Usually it goes something like this: “Dave, I’m worried about our business strategies. I’m not sure our strategy is right, we need to look at developing a new strategy and approach to growing our business,” or it might be, “Dave, we just aren’t getting the results from our sales process that we expect, we need to look at developing a new sales process,” or “Dave, our channel programs,” (or substitute whatever program you want), “just aren’t working. Can you help us develop something new?” We […]
Read MorePersuasion—it’s important to sales. It’s important to business. When we want to change something, we can’t do it without persuasion. Persuasion is a simple word, but somehow in the context of “selling” it becomes vile–it sets people off. It brings up all the worst stereotypes of peddlers and hucksters. Customers don’t want to be persuaded, “I feel like sales people are making me buy something I don’t want or don’t need.” Sales people, reacting against these stereotypes don’t want to acknowledge the “P” word. “We don’t do that, we can’t make people buy what they don’t want, we just want […]
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I got a call from Howard Stephens, Chairman and CEO of HR Chally. He wanted to talk to me about one of his passions, sales education in our colleges and universities. He gave me some interesting data. (I may have the numbers off a little–if there are errors, it’s my fault). For people graduating from college, 50% of them go into a first job as sales people. There are only a little more than 3 dozen colleges in the country (out of over 4000) that have a formal sales program in their curriculum’s. It’s important that […]
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