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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
Shifting From “I Have To…” To “I Get Too…”
Recently, I was having a conversation with an outstanding sales leader and friend, Robyn Wiseman. Periodically, we get together to exchange ideas. These conversations follow a familiar format; we talk a little about her team and what they are doing, sometimes there’s a little coaching, but mostly it’s recognition of the great job they are doing. What’s fascinating about Robyn and her team is they focus on basic, disciplined execution. No tricks, just focus on the fundamentals and creating value based conversations with prospects and customers. Then our conversation shifts to exploring other topics. In this conversation, I wanted to […]
Lead Follow-up Malpractice
Everyone struggles to generate leads. We struggle to provoke interest, to engage a prospect, to get people to respond to our outreach. The data on responses is, not surprisingly, horrible. We are “happy,” with response rates in fractions of percentage, we know we can generate volume just by doing more. Our abilities to generate leads are bleak. But what astounds me is how poorly we manage those leads we get. Too often, our response to a lead is completely inappropriate, as a result, we lose any possibility to generate a conversation, to nurture and develop a lead. Here’s an example, […]
We Must Take A First Step!
Yesterday, we were shocked to hear about yet another shooting. This time, at an elementary school in Texas. As of this morning, 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered! On a weekly basis, we hear of continued violence, murders. Whether it’s Black citizens shopping in a grocery store, Asians in a church, individuals on a subway train. And after each event, we hear our leaders offering condolences, saying the same thing, preening for the press. Some call for various forms of gun control. Some argue for different solutions, better approaches to mental health, better approaches to predicting and avoiding violent […]
Finding The “Music” Between The Notes…..
Some years ago, my father was mentoring a young man. My father was in his late 80s, the young man was in his late 20s and autistic. Both shared a passion for music. One day, my dad invited me to visit the young man, let me call him Robert. Robert lived in a special home, when we arrived he was sitting at the piano. He was playing some of the works of Schoenberg. The pieces were very complex, Robert’s playing was beautiful. I wasn’t smart enough to recognize the talent it took for Robert to play this music, I recognized […]
Unintended Consequences, Games Sellers Play…
Too often, in trying to “manage performance,” we put in place rules, policies, processes, we find they fail to produce what we expected. Sometimes, surprisingly, it’s the opposite of what we hoped. People “game” the system. The gaming process is the natural reaction of people to respond these rules, even if they, wittingly or unwittingly, drive behaviors counter to what management is trying to achieve. We typically see “gaming” of processes when management puts “rules” in place. Just as an example, one of the most gamed metrics is “calls/dials.” It’s very easy, particularly with technology, for sales people to achieve […]
Buying Is Broken! What’s This Mean For Selling?
Report after report tell us that buyers are failing in their mission to solve a problem and buy a solution. We know 60% of committed buying efforts end in no decision made. For those remaining 40%, a huge percentage of them express regret. It doesn’t take much of a leap to recognize Buying Is Broken! Despite this, sellers keep their noses to the grindstone. They continue to do the same things they have always done, and if they don’t get the results they need, they do more–faster. (At the behest of their managers, for whom, “more” is the miracle cure […]