Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Five Questions
When I started my career in sales, I had the privilege of getting some of the best training available in selling–IBM’s Sales Training program was a combination of classroom and field based experiences, that few other organizations could match in terms of quality and experience. However, when I think about the most valuable training I got in my first years at IBM, it was from the weekly sessions and reviews with my sales manager. I’d sit down with her once a week, she’d start reviewing the deals I was working on. She would take one opportunity and ask me 5 questions about […]
Evolving Your Sales Game Plan
Everything about how customers buy is changing—it means we all have to develop a new game plan. The old approaches are no longer sufficient. On Thursday, October 21, Focus.com is hosting a great event, a virtual summit, Evolving Your Sales Game Plan. It features a great group of people, and a wonderful agenda on some of the most important issues facing customers and sales professionals today. Agenda (Pacific Time) 08:00 a.m. The New Rules for Selling to Crazy-Busy Prospects,Jill Konrath, Internationally-Recognized Sales Strategist and Bestselling Author, 12:00 p.m. Social CRM: Selling to the 21st Century Customer, Paul Greenberg, Author, CRM […]
What Bumper Cars Teaches Me About Selling
This past weekend, we went to an amusement park. One of the rides I always enjoy is “Bumper Cars.” At this park, the ride was set up differently, there was basically a oval course, the objective was to get around the course as quickly as possible. It was fascinating to watch the different approaches people took. Some looked at the course, realizing if they went to the center, they would have the least distance to cover. They raced to the center and tried to cover ground as quickly as possible. Because a lot of people had the same strategy, the center […]
What Conversations Are You Starting?
Usually in sales, we aren’t starting conversations–we’re pursuing them or following up. Perhaps, it’s a query from a prospect and we follow up, qualifying them and moving forward. Sometimes we reach out to try to determine if the customer is interested in what we have to sell–too often with bad results. But really we only get engaged once the customer has determined they have a problem and they want to do something about it. What if we changed, what if we took the leadership and initiated things? What conversations are you starting? By this, I mean, how are you approaching […]
Thinking About Sales Professional Development
A few days ago I wrote a post, Should We Promote Our Best Sales People To Managers? It stirred some interesting debate, but one of the arguments that struck me centered around, “How do we retain our best people?” Moving a sales person into a management role in order to retain them is not necessarily a good idea, but the discussion about retaining and growing our sales people is an important discussion that I think is too often ignored. Leaders, sales or otherwise, have a responsibility for developing their people—both to achieve the highest levels of performance in their current […]
Expert Advice On Direct Marketing: SPAM Is The New Best Practice!
I just received this unsolicited email from someone I have never heard of, about something I have absolutely no interest in. They were soliciting my help in writing a blog post about them. It turns out, I thought it was an outstanding suggestion, though probably not for the reasons they suggest. Here’s the email: “Good afternoon. Please find attached two press releases related to XXX’s presence at the upcoming DMA conference in San Francisco and an exciting new product that one of their companies, YYY Solutions, is debuting. This innovative new printing process allows lenticular technology to be applied to direct […]