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
We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
As consultative, solutions, customer-focused sales professionals, we know that we are supposed to probe our customer’s needs, problems and challenges. Doing this is the mark of any good sales professional. Probing our customers, understanding their problems, quantifying and qualifying their needs is critical to proposing solutions to their issues. Customers appreciate sales professionals who provide value based and business justified solutions to their problems. But what happens when the customer doesn’t know that they have problems, or doesn’t recognize opportunities? What happens when they don’t know? No amount of good questioning and probing will get the customer to know what […]
What Do I Talk To Them About?
Just got off a call with some experienced sales people. We are starting an initiative in contacting current and past customers, hopefully to discover and pursue new opportunities. I sensed some apprehension in the meeting, finally I paused to ask them, “It seems like you have some concerns about what we are doing?” There was that pause, which on the phone seems like forever, when one of the sales people finally said, “I’m OK with calling these customers up, but what do I talk to them about? What should I be presenting, what should I be pitching, what should I […]
Sales Productivity — What If We Changed The Way We Look At The Problem?
Everyday, I speak with sales executives about the issues of sales productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. For any sales executive it’s a critical issue, something they are constantly seeking to improve. All the executives I speak with are bright, successful people. They constantly are looking at their sales processes, the skills of their people, the tools their people use, and other things to get the highest levels of performance out of their sales people. They are fine tuning, trying to find an edge, a few percent productivity improvement here or there. They are looking to reduce sales cycle times, improve win […]
The Recession Is Definitely Over!
It’s been a tough year for people and businesses. We’ve had the worst recession since the Depression. But it’s clear to me the recession is over. No, it wasn’t Ben Bernanke’s reassuring comments the other day. He’s just the Chairman of the Fed, what do they know, they’ve been wrong before. There is definitive proof the recession is over. Sales people are too busy to return my calls and to take my money. Things are definitely on the upswing! I have one of those major home improvement things going on. It’s driven by necessity, something broke, and it’s causing untold […]
Sales People, We’re Certainly A Talkative Bunch
I was interested in a Tweet last week from Gerhard Geschwandtner (@gerhard20 in twitter parlance). Gerhard’s the founder and publisher of Selling Power, and a key voice in the world of sales professionals. His tweet was important: @gerhard20 Ditch the pitch. We are in a conversation economy. The sales pitch is dead. I couldn’t agree with him more. The pitch is dead, professional selling is all about a meaningful dialogue or conversation with the customer. At least that’s what I’d like to believe. Except the evidence all points to the contrary. Being a curious type, I decided to go to the authorities: Google […]
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
It’s hard to practice what we preach. In honesty, sometimes, I want to just tell people to do as I say, not as I do. It’s so easy and seductive to fall into bad habits. The press of deadlines, the ever expanding list of to-do’s, the rush of everyday activities. It starts easily, I start taking short cuts, I start skipping critical steps in our process, I relax my standards, I get caught up in reacting. Pretty soon, I find the discipline, focus, and process that we preach as critical to success in business has slipped away. Sometimes slipping into “do […]