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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
Are You Coachable?
Being coachable, whether you are a top executive, a middle manager, a front line sales manager, or an individual contributor is critical to your success. To grow and develop, to improve our abilities to achieve our goals and results, we have to be constantly learning and developing. Having others providing feedback, coaching, helping us think about ways in which we might improve our ability to achieve our goals is something we must actively seek out. Yet I’m amazed at the number of people that are not only uncoachable, but actually refuse to take coaching and feedback. One of my clients […]
Secret Sales Hack—Fewer Conversations!
In a sales world that seems to be dominated by ever increasing volume, it’s ironic to realize one of the greatest sales hacks is actually to have fewer but more impactful conversations. Some years ago, conducted a survey of buyers and sellers. One of the findings in that research was that sales people tended to make 37% more calls than necessary to close. As we drilled into the data, we found the fundamental reasons were they weren’t designing and executing high impact sales calls. Let’s pause for a moment, think about the last 10 calls/meetings you had with a prospect […]
You Don’t Have The Time Not To Coach!
One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “How do I find the time to coach?” My immediate reaction is, “How can you possibly do your job without taking the time to coach?” Let me deconstruct this a little. Managers are accountable for making sure their teams hit their numbers. But there are only a few ways to do this. The manager can play “super sales person.” After all, the manager was probably a top sales person that was promoted into the manager role. Here’s the challenge with this strategy. First, when the manager was an individual contributor, […]
Product Versus Solution Selling
It must be that time of year, but recently I’ve gotten a number of queries from thoughtful executives: “Dave, we need to transform the way we sell from product to solution selling……” That statement is always a little confusing to me, naturally I ask, “What does that mean and why do you want to change?” Here the conversation usually gets a little fuzzy. Usually the response is “Customers want solutions not products….” My response is, “I get that, but what do you mean when you want to move from product selling to solutions?” Alternatively, I might ask, “What solutions do […]
Do Customers Really Have A Buying Process?
It’s become common “wisdom” that we have to align align our sales process with our customers’ buying processes. I write about it constantly, as well as hundreds of others. It’s become almost a mantra in all the literature and training programs. I suppose it’s easy to want to believe customers have buying processes. Certainly, procurement has processes they follow in their buying activities. There is a certain structure/process to the RFP/RFQ process. Things we buy every day have a certain routine-ness to them, to the point they become transactional, which may be a process. But if we look at complex […]
Clinging To The Past
Both we and our customers struggle with change. Think, for a moment, how many times you may have said, or you’ve heard within your organization or from your customers: “But we’ve always done things this way…….” “If it ain’t broke……” We live in business and personal worlds characterized by turbulence and change. Clinging to the things we’ve always done forces us to stay stuck in the past. Ironically, we are working harder than ever before. We are putting in longer hours, we are constantly increasing volumes–more calls, more prospecting, more deals, bigger pipelines. We are doing more of what we’ve […]