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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
Sourcing Future Sales Leaders
A 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 […]
The World’s Greatest Salesperson – A Culture Of Pitchmen?
There has been such a great discussion going on at my last post on this topic. If you’ve missed it, you should look at it, The World’s Greatest Salesperson. The discussion in the comments is better than the post itself. As I read the stream of comments, there has been a lot of indignation over the concept of “How Important Is the Pitch” to professional selling. OgilvyOne has been singled out for their lack of understanding of professional selling and reducing professional sales to crafty presentations an pitches. But I wonder if pointing the finger at Ogilvy is just too easy […]
How Would I Sell A Brick?
Well, I created a lot of discussion about OgilvyOne’s contest to find the world’s greatest sales person in my post . We’ve started a great discussion about professionalism in sales. But the competitor in me has been whispering in my ear, “How would you sell a brick?” I’ve been thinking about it, using all my sales professionalism. There’s something about sales people wanting to step up to every challenge. Let’s see, I’ve got to target a certain customer set (segmentation), within that customers set I have to find a customer with a compelling need to buy (prospecting and qualifying), I’ve […]
The World’s Greatest Salesperson!
My colleagues have been talking about OgilvyOne’s contest to find the world’s greatest salesperson. I was curious about it, went to the website to read the press release and to their YouTube Channel to learn more. It’s an intriguing notion. I have to bow to the wisdom of Ogilvy, after all they are a prestigious advertising firm, they must really understand sales. The Chairman of OgilvyOne, Brian Fetherstonhaugh, has said, “In marketing, the noble craft of salesmanship sometimes, gets lost in the pursuit of art or the dazzle of technology.” Cool–I can’t disagree with this. Executive Creative Directof, Mat Zucker, […]
What Are The Biggest Challenges Facing Sales VP’s In This Economy
I had hoped we were beyond the, “How do we cope with this economy” questions. However, I recently had the question, “What are the biggest challenges vice presidents of sales and marketing face in this economy?” Implicit in the question is the challenges have changed because of the economy. It’s clear, sales and marketing executives face a lot of challenges, but I don’t think the challenges are different than those that existed before the downturn. What the economy has done is brought many of them into sharper focus or raised their importance to executives. Sales and marketing executives have always […]
Coaching The Sales Process
I’m getting all kinds of messages and emails. I must be wearing people down with my incessant pleas for organizations to update their sales processes–to make them really work, to assure they reflect current realities, priorities, markets, and competition. A number of sales managers have contacted me asking for further guidance. Last week, I got an email, saying, “Dave, I buy what you are saying. I want to make certain my team is executing the sales process as effectively as possible. What should I be doing to make certain they are doing this? How do I fit this coaching into my already […]