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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
Where You Are Depends On Your Point Of View, A Fragile Sales Ecosystem
I’ve gotten a number of very positive comments on my post last week: If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Bigger Trouble!I wanted to expand on it, and to see if I could expand the dialog in the community—-meaning, Please Send Comments—regardless of where you see this, at my blog site, the Customer Collective, Sales Management 2.0, Top Sales Experts, SalesMarks, or wherever. If you are a blogger, feel free to publish this as a “guest post.”The comments confirm my thoughts in the original post. This is an important issue for all businesses, and sales can take […]
Delivering Happiness! Zappo’s
Zappo’s is one of the hottest and most innovative companies around. This is an inspirational presentations by Tony Hsieh, their CEO. There are important lessons in this for any business professional. Zappos – Startup2Startup – 03-26-09 View more presentations from zappos.
If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Bigger Trouble!
I usually direct this blog to sales and business professionals, focusing many of the discussions on the “sell” side issues. For this post, however, I want to focus on the “buy side.” A few weeks ago in Moving Beyond Selling To Building Collaborative Relationships, I cited a PWC CEO Survey in which 71% of CEO’s believed collaborative business relationships were critical with customers, yet only 40% felt these relationships were important for their suppliers? Talk to any sales person and you will find they are being hammered in their negotiations. Talk to any business professional and they will complain about […]
Social Media/Sales 2.0 — Are The Right People Listening?
I’ve been involved in a few debates over the past few months that seem to be “Old School Sales” versus “New School Sales.” They are odd debates. The debates are carried out in the “blogosphere,” which, I think, is one of the newer school vehicles. They seem to be carried out by individuals that are actively engaged in using or experimenting with the new tools. Everyone trying to learn about how to leverage these tools to displace old tools or complement them (I won’t get into that debate right now). The odd thing is these discussions/arguments are among people who […]
What Commoditized Products Can Teach Us About Selling
I have a confession, I grew up selling high tech systems, software and complex solutions. I spent much of my career in selling very complex capital equipment. For years, I had an arrogance that real sales people sold these solutions, everything else was order taking. A number of years ago, several companies having commoditized products managed to overlook my arrogance and asked me to help improve their sales processes. I think may have gotten more from them than they may have gotten from me. For so many years, we systems guys relied on great products. We would go to great […]
SBWA — Selling By Wandering Around
In their 1982 book, In Search Of Excellence, Peters and Waterman coined the acronym: MBWA – Management By Wandering Around. The thought was for managers to literally get close to customers and their people by “wandering around.” I thought it time to resurface a variant of that theme: SBWA, Selling By Wandering Around. I’m constantly amazed by how little sales professionals to this. Too many sales people call on the same people, asking the same question, “Can I sell you anything today?” The more solutions oriented sales people will question needs and priorities, but make the same mistake of calling […]