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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
What If We Can’t Find Compelling Value For Our Solutions?
I was reading Rebel Brown’s great post: Accentuate The Positive. It focuses on positive messages and approaches in sales and marketing. She raised an interesting question, What if we can’t find a compelling value-based approach for our solutions? The question is scary, but fascinating. I think it impacts many of us, whether in a specific sales opportunity, or in marketing and product programs. It’ something we’re afraid to confront with ourselves, our managers, our companies. The current economy makes this issue all too visible. A month ago, I was having a conversation with a senior sales executive with a very large company. […]
Sales Manager’s Self Audit and Management Checklist
I’m a great fan of checklists. Using checklists means I don’t have to encumber my mind with remembering everything (when you have a mind as feeble as mine, it’s really critical). Checklists are also a way to quickly inspect what I am doing to make sure I’m executing as sharply and efficiently as possible. On August 3, I posted Sales Leaders Organizational Checkup and Self-Assessment. It was a guest post, authored by my good friend, Jeff Stanley, Director Of Sales Excellence, AT&T Mobility. We got some interesting feedback from that post. As a result, I have put together a Sales […]
Mentoring–Your Complete Guide
This afternoon, when the mail arrived in the office, I dropped everything. A book, I had been waiting for was delivered. Manager’s Guide To Mentoring, written by my friend, Dr. Curtis Crawford, is one of the most comprehensive guides to mentoring I have ever seen. Curtis and I have been talking about the book for some time, I was eagerly awaiting it, prodding him for hints and clues about what he was writing. He steadfastly refused to tell, me, but if you know Curtis, the principles by which he works, and his personal impact as a mentor, it was not […]
Scaring Customers Spitless — Does This Build Respect and Trust?
Geoffrey James has generated a lot of interesting reactions with his article, To Sell More, Scare Customers Spitless. Last week expressed my opinion about the content of the post in Provocative Selling, “The Shock and Awe” of Selling? I’ve been interested in the reactions and comments to Mr. James post. Most of the comments focus on the concept of “Scaring Customers Spitless,” and creating “Fear” with customers. To some degree, I share many of the commenters opinions of the words that Mr. James has chosen to use. Use of these types of words is alarming because they may betray underlying […]
Provocative Selling — The “Shock And Awe” Of Selling?
I just read To Sell More, Scare Customer Spitless by Geoffrey James at BNET. The headline catches your attention–It’s a discussion of Geoffrey Moore’s Provocative Selling. In case you have missed the discussion, Provocative Selling is the latest gimmick to catch your customer’s attention, making them aware of problems and opportunities to improve their business. In the case made by Moore, you are making the customer aware of things they may not have been aware of in the past. You surface areas of under performance relative to the industry or competition, you surface opportunities for growth or improvement. While I […]
Rethinking Qualifying—Is This Good Business For Us?
Most of the time when we think about qualifying sales opportunities, we focus on the customer situation. We consider: Do they have a real need to buy, is there some compelling issue, opportunity or problem they have urgency in addressing? Do they have funding for a solution, or will they commit funding once it’s justified? Are they willing to seriously consider as a potential solution provider? There may be other criteria depending on how you qualify opportunities. There’s something important missing, it’s an asessment of whether this is good business for our company. It’s important to think about whether this […]