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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
Building Your Personal Brand — Again
There’s a lot of discussion about how important it is for sales people to “build their personal brands.” I’ve written about this topic several times before, even using the same title before. But it’s a topic, as much as I wish would go away, doesn’t. But what does it mean to build our personal brands? Many advocate building a massive social media presence–doing everything one can by increasing your presence in places like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social channels. Apparently, we are supposed to blog and tweet. We are supposed to be constantly involved in conversations or other […]
Customers And Rational Behaviors
Too often, I’m in reviews with sales people whining, “The customer is irrational!” They go through a litany of complaints, including: “They don’t understand our products and why they are superior…..” (Of course it’s not their job to do that.) “They keep changing their minds….” “They aren’t being logical, we’ve presented all the data/analysis, it should be obvious….” and on and on and on….. The net of it seems to be “customers are behaving irrationally when they don’t do the things we want them to do.” There’s the managerial version of the same thing, whining about their people. You know […]
Going In Circles
I had been working intensely doing some analysis for a client. My head was beginning to spin, and I needed a break. As fortune would have it, at just that moment, some poor SDR decided to call (or at least their power dialers decided to call). Normally, I don’t answer these calls, but I needed a break…… “May I speak to the person in charge of …….” said the SDR. “I suppose that would be me, I’m CEO of the company,” I replied. The SDR sounded a little disappointed, he really wanted to talk to someone in our IT department, […]
Building On Shaky Foundations
It was an interesting conversation. I was meeting with a very thoughtful sales executive. He was about to make some pretty big investments in training and in technology tools. I asked him why he was making those investments, he replied, “We really need to raise the skills and productivity of the sales people. They aren’t performing as they should be, we need to up their game.” I then asked, “Is it the absence of those specific skills and that technology that is impacting their ability to perform?” He paused, and looked at me, “What do you mean?” As we went […]
Customers Feel Value
Scott Gillum and I were having one of our usual conversations, the marketing vs. sales conversation. As usual, I thought, Scott is a wickedly smart marketing professional. Somehow those words seem like an oxymoron, but in his case it’s pure truth. During our conversation, Scott said something that stopped me for a few minutes, “Customers feel value.” I don’t know it Scott intended it that way, but I felt it at the moment he said it. And I think the ability for the customers to feel value is probably the ultimate manifestation of value creation. Think to situations where you […]
The “One Thing”
Sales people and managers struggle with achieving their goals. We have to do everything–prospect, work the deals in our pipelines, do increasing amounts of reporting, and on and on. When we struggle to achieve our goals, the answers, perhaps disguised as coaching, are to “Do More!” Usually, that means do more of everything; prospecting working the deals in our pipelines, and more reporting. Sometimes it’s “Do more of this one thing….” These days, it’s usually more prospecting, as if that’s the only answer to fixing a lean pipeline. Now here’s where it starts to get confusing, hang in there. We […]