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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
The Lost Opportunity Of Focusing On Customers With “Needs”
It’s always terrible to start a blog post with a disclaimer. It’s great to have customers with “needs.” Implicit in this, is they have recognized they have a problem or opportunity and are somewhere on the path to addressing that—including searching for solutions. These customers with “needs” are great. Our ability to engage them is much easier, since they are more likely to be interested in learning about how we can address those needs. There are some challenges–they may have preconceived ideas, they may be going down a path that’s very different, they may not have a complete understanding of […]
How Do I Find The Best Salespeople?
I was just talking to an outstanding Vice President of Sales. The solutions his company develops address very complex issues in “manufacturing.” (I’m using that as a surrogate for what he is really doing.) It’s a complex sale. It’s an early stage company, they are starting to have great success and are closing some very large, intriguing deals. He needs to grow the sales team, hiring BDRs, Account Managers and others. He asked, “How do I find the best sales people?” I asked, “Well what are the characteristics of the best sales people you have on board now? What are […]
We’ve Met The Enemy, It’s Us
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” first appeared in the Pogo comic strip by Walt Kelley on April 22, 1970. File this post under the, “Isn’t it ironic category.” For those who follow the blog, you know I go through all sorts of rants or raves about prospecting. Whether it’s email, phone calls, leveraging social tools, cold calling, warm calling…….. Inevitably, these posts generate all sorts of comments: “People don’t pick up the phone any more…..” “People don’t respond to a phone call with a caller ID they don’t recognize…” “They won’t read emails…….” “They don’t respond […]
#MyFirstSevenJobs Maddy Pesec And Alyson Button Stone
There’s a series going around the web about people’s First Seven Jobs. It’s been fun and fascinating to see the very first jobs people held. There’s a diverse selection of people’s first seven jobs here, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Keenan. I jumped onto the bandwagon with my first 7 jobs. In the comments, you can also see Hank Barnes‘ first seven. It’s actually a huge amount of fun–first thinking about your own, reflecting on what they meant to you (privately) and seeing others’ experience. Consequently, I’ve invited a huge number of people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations, to […]
What Value Are You Creating For Your People?
Some managers reading this title will be thinking, “Dave, you’ve got this backwards, they’re our people, our employees, they work for us. They need to be creating value for us. That’s what we hire them for, to bring in orders!” It’s this very attitude that creates the challenges we have within too many of our organizations today. Our jobs as leaders is to maximize the performance of each person on our teams. It’s about enabling them and empowering them to do the jobs we hired them for and to produce the results expected. And it’s getting out of their way […]
Short-Cuts Always Come Up Short
Under pressure, it’s human nature to take short-cuts. We have the tendency to consciously choose the expedient over what we know to be right. We don’t have enough deals in our pipelines, we need to find more deals. Under pressure, we relax our qualification criteria, we cast a wider net, looking far outside our sweet spots. Sure we achieve the objective of getting more in our pipeline, in the short term. But the quality of our pipeline had suffered in the process. Our probability of winning plummets, we have to spend more time on flaky deals, rather than focusing on […]