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
Why Do Sales People Have Such A Bad Reputation?
It’s Friday evening, I’m cruising some of the blogs and other forums as I wind up the day. I saw a question posed on the Sales Best Practices board in LinkedIn. The question concerned the Reputation of Sales, asking about why do we see such bad stereotypes of sales people — lazy, unprofessional, etc. It went on to ask why people don’t like sales people. For those of you that are regular readers, you probably know that was all that was needed to set me back on my soapbox. Here’s my response: “I’ve been a proud sales professional for all […]
No Grin-F#!?ing Allowed!
Well, I’ve got your attention with the implied profanity! Sorry about that, but we all know what I mean. We’ve all seen it, experienced it, even actively participated in it. We all know what is happening. Think of the endless meetings we have, whether they are internal meetings, with customers, suppliers, and others. Everyone presents a polite face. There is an air of “superficial congeniality,” seeming agreement, then the meeting ends and everyone goes off and does what they intended anyway. It may be a passive aggressiveness, it may be an avoidance to confront and openly discuss the tough issues. […]
Reducing the Learning Curve: Rapid Onboarding Critical to Sales Performance
Guest Post By Jeffrey Stanley, Director of Sales Excellence, AT&T Mobility All 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 […]
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 […]