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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
Reducing the Learning Curve: Rapid Onboarding Critical to Sales Performance
Guest Post By Jeffrey Stanley, Director of Sales Excellence, AT&T MobilityAll sales managers know the problem…we’ve spent months recruiting, interviewing and hiring the right person. The great hire has started, all of a sudden management is complaining: Why aren’t they producing sales?Or even worse, we know that we’ve made a great hire, sent them to training and assigned them a strong territory. However, after 3 or 4 months they get frustrated and leave. Not only do we have to take the time to go through the process all over again, but we have the tremendous expense and more importantly, the […]
Stop Pitching, Start Listening To Your Customers
Last week, I wrote a post “Stop Assuming Your Know Your Customers, Start Listening To Them! The post stimulated a lot of comments on the different sites it was posted on. Thanks to each of you who took the time to offer your great ideas! In that post, I ranted about the focus sales and marketing professionals seem to have on “Pitching,” arguing we need to stop pitching and start engaging our customers in conversations. I’m back on my soapbox, I read a post from someone I hold in high regard, but he set me off. The post was entitled, […]
Work On Stuff That Matters
Thanks to Jim Estill, I came across this outstanding post by Tim O’Rielly: Work On Stuff That Matters, First Principles. As you read this post, you are reading the fourth re-write. At first I summarized Tim’s post, adding my views. Then I tried expanding on it. As I re-read and edited, I realized I was trying to polish something that didn’t need polishing. Read Tim’s post, it’s important. Then figure out what matters to you and work on it!
Moving From Customer Acquisiton To Customer Engagement
For some strange reason, in the past few days, at least four different executives have called me to speak about changes they see with their customers markets and organizations. The conversations all began at different points, for differing reasons, but seemed to be converging on a central issue: The need for organizations, marketing, and sales to focus on Customer Engagement as critical to success and growth in the future. I have to admit, I am still sorting out some of the issues and what they mean, but some of the things we see are: 1. Traditional means of acquiring customers […]
Stop Assuming You Know Your Customers, Start Listening To Them!
Thanks to one of Fred Wilson’s recent posts, I discovered Whitney Hess, a user experience designer in New York. She was quoted: “In order to survive, companies have to stop assuming they know their customers and start listening to them.” Simple and profound. I spend a lot of my time with business, marketing, and sales executives. Many espouse being customer focused. Many are making good strides, but in my experience we have a long way to go. Whitney’s comment got me thinking. Why is it so difficult to listen to our customers? Why is it so difficult to engage our […]
New Year and Goals
I’ve taken a brief holiday from posting, now am back in full force—partly a reflection of goals I have set for myself, the business, and this blog. Getting started in the New Year had me reflect on setting goals–somehow on January 1, we call them resolutions, the rest of the year they are goals. I am constantly amazed at how casually most people treat goals–particularly those they set for themselves. Rather than repeat what lot of well thought out recommendations and observations, I thought it more useful to point you to some good blog posts on the topic. Seth Godin […]