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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
Freeing Up Our Time, Or Using Our Time More Effectively?
Time management is a huge issue for all of us, but particularly important for sellers. A lot of the conversation focuses on “freeing up time.” But as I think about it, is the issue really about freeing up time or is it about using our time more effectively? For example, Gartner published an interesting analysis. They looked at how sellers are spending their time. While Gartner’s article suggests shifts in how that time is allocated—most of which I disagree with, this chart is interesting. Looking at prospecting and conducting sales calls–sellers are spending 33% of their time engaging with customers/prospects. […]
Doing Your Homework
Growing up, often my Dad, and sometimes my Mom, would really piss me off. Every evening after dinner they would say, “Go do your homework!” My sisters and I always had more interesting things we wanted to do, whether it was getting together with friends or watching something on TV. But they were very strict, before we did anything else, we had to complete our homework. Sometimes they would sit with us, looking at what we were doing, helping us where we were struggling. Mom would always read the papers we wrote and make suggestions. When I went to college, […]
The Pipeline Generation Problem…
Building and maintaining robust/healthy pipelines is a problem with most organizations. Virtually every organization seems to be struggling with this. And if my social feeds are any indication, filling anemic pipelines is the number 1 problem facing organizations. My email is filled with endless outreaches. I get texts from people/numbers I have never encountered. By social feeds are filled with connection requests suggesting, “I’d like to tell you how we can guarantee and endless stream of high quality leads…..” In addition to all the techniques suggested for filling the top of our pipelines, AI is here to save us! We […]
Recruiting? Do You Know What You Are Looking For?
For those who have worked with me, you know the importance I hold Competency Models. These are critical, both for recruiting, but also onboarding and ongoing development. Without these, we don’t know whether we are recruiting and hiring the right people, or developing them to achieve their full potential. What is a Competency Model? An easy way, at least for sellers, is to think of it as your organization’s ICP–Ideal Customer Profiles. We know the importance of the ICP. The ICP represents customers who are likely to have the problems we are the best in the world at solving, and […]
Time Available For Selling
Time Available For Selling is a critical issue for everyone in sales. But there are many things, both necessary and unnecessary, that distract from that time. Thinking of sellers chained to their desks, constantly on Zoom, telephone, or other meetings. Constantly doing email and social outreach, is unrealistic and unreasonable. But before I go into a further discussion about time available for selling, let me first define how I look at time available for selling. Time available for selling is the time sellers spend preparing for a customer interaction, the interaction itself, and the follow-up from that interaction. We want […]
Do You Really Understand Your Customers’ Problems?
We are trained on what our products do. We know their capabilities, features and functions. We may know the “problem” they solve. They might improve productivity or efficiency. They might help our customers reduce costs. They might give them capabilities they currently don’t have. But does this mean we really understand our customers’ problems? Our customers are thinking about the following……. What causes these problems to occur? What should our customers be paying attention to in order to detect they may have a problem? What are the clues or leading signals they might understand? How do we characterize or define […]