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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
CXO’s—It’s Getting Crowded At The “CEO’s Table”
Nearly every day, I read of a new CXO title. The latest is Chief Resilience Officer–though I suspect the person’s tongue was deeply planted in his cheek. It seems everyone. There used to be such simple titles, like VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, VP of Procurement, and on and on and on. The CFO title seems to have been around for some time–at least as long as I’ve been working (which is a fair amount of time). But in recent years, there’s a rush to CXO titles and to getting a “seat at the CEO’s table.” It strikes me […]
Customers Are Choosing How To Invest Their Time, Is Investing In You Their Best Investment?
The reality of our professional, business, (perhaps our personal lives), is that we are time poor. Everyone is over-committed, overworked, and overwhelmed. Time becomes their most precious and unrecoverable commodity. With this as the glaring reality of our own time utilization and that of our customers, I’m astounded at how cavalier we are about how we use time. From a customer point of view, research report after research report comes back with one of the top issues customers have about sales people: “They waste my time!” Every sales person I talk to, the number one problem is, “I can’t get […]
Show Your Customers That You Care
Everything we read about customers and their attitudes about sales people is pretty negative. Customers do everything they can to avoid sales people until the very last moment. To most customer, 600 sales people trapped in a downed plane on the ocean floor is simply a good start. When one looks at the orientation and focus of most sales and marketing programs, it’s no wonder customers feel that way. From the very initiation of a relationship, it’s all about the sales person, their company, their products. Think about it, from our very first interactions we aren’t demonstrating that we care, […]
Prospecting, How Much Pre Call Research?
How much pre-call research do you need to do to be effective in your prospecting? Frankly, it’s a really loaded question, with answers all over the place. Some argue you need to research deeply, learning as much as you can about the company and the individual as possible, becoming well informed about them and their business so you can be relevant in the conversation. I’ve always tended to default to this answer–but it’s largely driven by my target prospects, which tend to be C-Level Executives of very large corporations. It’s hard to reach them, so I want to make sure […]
Bad Advice: Focus Your Coaching On Your Top Performers!
I just read some really bad advice from a really smart individual, “Managers spend too much time on their bottom performers, they need to focus on their top and middle performers.” The explanation went on that time invested in bottom performers wouldn’t result in substantive performance improvement, the equivalent time spent with our top performers produces more results. On the surface this makes sense, it’s easy to jump on that bandwagon. But in reality, it’s actually pretty bad advice. Before diving into this, I do have to admit, I’m probably taking a lot of what this individual was saying, out […]
Leadership And Empathy
Surprisingly, one of the characteristics I see too many managers lacking is empathy. One would think otherwise, after all, most sales managers have been sales people at some point in their career. We would think these managers would have deep understanding of the challenges sales people face every day. Perhaps there’s a switch, of some sort, that causes individuals to forget what it means to sell in today’s environment. Perhaps it’s the seduction of sitting behind a screen, pouring through endless amounts of data, trying to find the magic answer to driving sales performance (the answers aren’t there–stop looking, though […]