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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
Customer Stuck? Not Moving Forward?
It’s a common lament among sales people, “I’m trying to close the customer, I can’t get them to move forward! They’re dragging their feet, they just won’t order!” Last week, with several clients, I was doing pipeline reviews. Too many sales people were saying this, slipping their forecasts, slipping their target close dates another month (one becomes suspicious when you see 11 sequential monthly slips on a deal–but I’ll leave that for another post). How do we get them to move forward? Recently, I saw some horribly bad advice on this. Frankly, I thought these techniques had gone out with […]
Little Things Add Up
It was 9:25 am, I was getting upset. The meeting had been called to start at 9:00 am. It was an important meeting. We were finalizing recommendations for a project and preparing for an executive review. At 9:25 about 70% of the required participants were in their seats. They were tinkering with email, catching up with each other. At 9:35 we decided to start, not everyone we needed was there. We had sent messages reminding, pleading, demanding they show up. But we had wasted enough time. By 10:00 everyone that needed to be in the room was there. The few […]
Invest In Training Your Sales People Every Day! A Conversation With Tory Hornsby
Would you invest in training your sales people for 45 minutes every day? The reaction of most sales managers would be “Hell No! That’s at least 10% of their productive time, I need them out selling!” My friend Tory Hornsby, COO of Sharpshooter Marketing and Powersports Marketing, has quite a different response. He would say, “I can’t afford not to!” Tory and his sales management team take the entire sales team through 45 minutes of training every day! They start their mornings with a meeting dedicated to celebrating what people have accomplished and developing new skills. Each day, has a […]
Everyone Is Fighting A Battle You Know Nothing About!*
Today, I had an unusual exchange of emails with a top executive (client and close friend). I’d sent, perhaps too casually, a note with a critique and suggestions on a project his team had been working on, somewhat related to the things I was doing with the organization. It was a very tough project, they had done a good job, despite the circumstances and restrictions they faced. But there were some areas that need to be addressed to help in executing the overall strategies and plans we’d been working on with the executive. I dashed off a quick note with […]
Back To Basics!
There are thousands of posts, hundreds of books that examine every nuance of sales enablement and performance management. Billions are spent in advanced or specialized sales training programs or sales enablement tools. Somehow, it’s not popular or fashionable to focus on the basics. There’s nothing sexy or exciting about them. Writing about the basics won’t sell books. Sometimes we assume everyone is executing the basics, until we start examining what people are doing. Are they prospecting the right opportunities, those in our sweet spot? Do they understand the problem/opportunity the customer wants to solve? Is it a problem/opportunity that we […]
My “Bot” Will Talk To Your “Bot”
Recently, I was asked to comment for an eBook on Attention Scarcity In Marketing. It’s an interesting topic, you’ll see my contrarian position in a few weeks when it’s published. It’s not hard to understand this issue, yet I suspect the culprits in creating this Attention Scarcity are marketing and sales folks. It seems the favored method to catch attention is to escalate the volume of communications (both figuratively and literally). Everyday, we pummel each other with a never ending stream of messages, offers, provocative positions—all in the quest of catching someone’s attention. And the tools, or at least the […]