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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
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 […]
Are You Committed To Upsetting The Status Quo?
Sales is about change–if we are successful with our customers, we get them to change, buying our products and services. But if sales is about change, why are so many sales people resistant to changing how they sell. In too many conversations, I see people and organizations stuck doing things the same way they have always done them. Without a doubt, people are working harder and much longer hours, but doing the same old things longer and faster won’t change the circumstance. In truth, the tried and true approaches we used in the past don’t work. It’s not the economy […]
Location-Based Prospecting? Are Ad-Hoc Sales Calls Valuable?
I’ve been intrigued about much of the publicity around Hoover’s Near Here offering. Apparently it’s an Iphone based application for a sales person to find new prospects close to them–wherever they might be. I’m certain this is the first of many new services that will be offered by organizations like Hoovers (In fact, LinkedIn and Tripit have been offering similar, but much lower capability for some time). I’m intrigued about the offerings, but really wonder if this is the type of prospecting behavior we want to encourage? The approach reminds me of those sales people who start out on the […]