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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
Can Your Sales People Lead A Business Conversation?
The role of sales has clearly changed. We no longer have to spend our time educating customers about our products and solutions. Beside, too often, they really don’t care about our products and their capabilities. If we can’t talk to them about our solutions, then what’s left? What do we talk to them about? I guess, we have to focus on what interests them. Their jobs, roles, goals, aspirations. We need to talk about their challenges, opportunities, problems they may be having. We need to talk about their customers, their competition, their industry — and their potential impact on the […]
93.2353% Of Plan
As I write this post, I’m 93.2353% toward a goal I set for all of us. It’s simply unacceptable for me not to meet plan, so I need your help. Many of you know that I’ve supported Charity:Water for a number of years. I started this year’s campaign about a week ago. In a very short time, through your generosity, we’ve raised $7925–so far. For those who’ve contributed, even just a few dollars, I can’t thank you enough. Already, we’ve raised enough money to provide water for several hundred people. This year, I set a several goals: I would match contributions […]
Numbers Make The Conversation More Interesting
Numbers are the bane of many sales people’s existence. Everyone wants to talk about numbers, but it’s far more fun and easy to talk about our cool products, the flashy features, and all the bells and whistles. Or in conversations with our managers, it’s easier to talk about all the stuff we are doing, or the stuff the customer isn’t doing, than to talk about the numbers. But let’s face it, numbers make the conversation more interesting—the right numbers! Numbers catch the attention of executives and decision makers, so if we aren’t comfortable talking about the numbers, we’re going to […]
Deal Slippage
It’s the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year….. I’m looking at the pipelines of several clients (sometimes, I think they regret giving me access to their CRM systems) and I see a flurry of activity. Yes some of it is deals coming in and being closed, but too much of it is slipping the target close date. Move it out a month, a quarter….. I look at the history of some of the deals, one has moved 11 times in the past 11 months, you guessed it, every month the sales person slips the […]
The Purpose Of Selling Is To ………
Complete the sentence, “The purpose of selling is to…….” When I ask sales people and managers that question, the responses vary but generally fit into one of the categories below: …… to make my/our numbers. …… to sell our company’s solutions and products. ….. to achieve our revenue and growth goals. ….. to grow our company. Those are all outcomes of being successful in selling, but what’s absent in each of those perspectives? It’s pretty easy to recognize, it’s the customer. All the responses are very self-centered, focused on what we want to achieve. We take it for granted, but […]
It’s All About Water!
Most of us are fortunate, we don’t have to worry about the basics of life—like potable water. We tend to take it for granted, even wasting too much. Yet finding clean, potable sufficient for daily survival is a problem for over 663 Million people in the world. Diseases from dirty water kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Long time readers know that for the past few years I’ve sponsored a campaign with Charity:Water. Over the past years, we’ve raised close to $23K, funding wells in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia. These wells provide water […]