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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
March Madness, I’m Getting Ready!
(This was originally published on 12/16 in Sales Bloggers Union: March Madness, I’m Getting Ready) NCAA Basketball has a tremendous impact on my schedule starting now. I’m looking at the schedule, kind of planning my time backward. According to the NCAA Basketball site, final selection is on March 14, Opening Round Game is March 16, Fourth Round Completes on March 28 and the final four on April 3rd and 5th. I’m getting my schedule ready in anticipation. I think of the teams–all aiming to be part of March Madness. Actually, they started months ago in their training. Their seasons are […]
A Rarely Tapped FREE Sales Development And Training Resource
I’ve been working with a team of outstanding Sales Enablement professionals for a large software company, we’re working with them in launching a major new product. One of the brilliant things they have done is to use the functional executives and other people in their own company to help the sales people better understand what drives similar people at their customers. Let me back up and explain. The target customers for my client’s sales teams are the IT executives and managers in their customers. The sales enablement team wanted to show the sales people they needed to connect with the […]
Lead Nurturing Or Harassment?
I normally don’t write about things like lead nurturing, choosing to leave that to real experts like my friend Ardath Albee, however I need to rant—I’m just tired and pissed off. It seems the Holiday Season and the New Year bring out the worst behaviors in marketers. I’m getting daily emails and close to daily snail mails from some of my previously “trusted suppliers.” Let me be clear, I know I will get a lot of offers that I just don’t won’t–junk mail (real or electronic). It’s just a part of the “paper the world” philosophy that we too many […]
The Good News Is Our Sales People Are Charging Full Speed Ahead……
There’s nothing like being around sales people excited and energized with a new product launch or new marketing initiative. Once they understand it and know what to do, there’s no stopping them. They will break down brick walls, they’ll charge forward 200 miles per hour doing exactly what you told them to do. They will go out and try to overcome anything to make the sale. It’s trully exciting being around a sales team with this kind of energy. That’s the good news. The bad news is: If you have pointed them in the wrong direction or have not equipped them to […]
Do Our Rules, Procedures And Incentives Limit Our Effectiveness?
A soapbox I have been on has been to put the “thoughtfulness” back into our business practice. What I mean by this is not being courteous and polite to people (though we should be), but to be thought-full in how we develop and execute our business, sales and marketing strategies. To not blindly do what we have done in the past, but to think about what we should be doing, to think about doing things right, and to do the right thing. Too often, it seems that we go through the motions. Or because we don’t trust our people to […]
You, Your Products, and Your Company Suck!
It’s Friday afternoon, the end of an incredibly busy week, I’m taking a few moments to reflect on some of the most interesting discussions of the week. With several clients, and some of my good friends, including Keith Bossey, John Cousineau, Jim Keenan, and Jonathan Farrington, I’ve found myself in discussions about handling serious, often critical, and sometimes impolite customer feedback or objections. One of the greatest challenges sales professionals face is engaging our customers. We try but can’t catch their attention or gain their interest in our offerings. Then suddenly some feedback comes in, often some variant of “your […]