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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
Managers, Our People Are Our Customers
What if we applied the principles of high impact, value creating selling to our work with our own people? What if we started applying the principles we leverage to create differential advantage, customer experience which drive retention, renewal, and growing our customers to our people. We know some things about our customers: They don’t care about how much we talk about our success, who we are, and our companies.We know they care most about their own success. They want to eliminate problems, address new opportunities, grow, achieve their goals.We know they don’t care about our goals and what we need […]
The Prospecting Call(s)
The phone rang, I absently picked it up, thinking it was another call that was scheduled about 10 minutes later. It ended up being the wrong call, it was a prospecting call, “Dave, this is Chris from……. We missed you at Dreamforce and wanted to talk about how you can leverage our tool at your company.” Not meaning to be nasty, I asked, “Do you know what our company does? What do you know about me?” Chris started guessing, “I think your company is…… I don’t really know about you.” I was pretty abrupt, I said, “You’ve got it all […]
So Now You Are A New Sales Manager, What’s Different?
First, congratulations, your first job as a sales manager is a huge step forward in your career. Now, don’t screw it up—you’ll get a lot of managers who will immediately congratulate you, shake your hand, smile then say, “What have you done for me lately?” Before I go on, let’s backtrack a little bit. How did you get here? Probably one of a couple of things happened. You are working for the same company and have gotten a big promotion, moving from an individual contributor role to the first line sales manager role. Alternatively, you competed for a sales manager […]
We Know About The “Digital Buying Journey,” But What Does This Mean About Digital Trust?
We know trust is important in all our relationships. We know that trust is critical in vendor/customer relationships. Charlie Green has helped us understand that trust is not an absolute, but is contextual. For example, trust in a simple buying transaction is different than the trust in a complex B2B decision. The level of risk of choosing incorrectly is different, consequently the way we view trust in those decisions differs. Charlie helped us understand some of the dimensions of trust worthiness with the trust equation: Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation But how do we establish trust […]
Introducing “Radical Lessness”
We live in a world where we seem to be driven by “Doing More.” As sellers, “more” is the mantra–more dials, more calls, more meetings, more activities. When we fall short of our goals, the answer is to do more. But, it’s not just sellers that are consumed with doing more. Every manager or executive I meet is consumed by the demand for more. I look at their calendars, their to do lists, there is always more. I talk to them about their “guilt.” It’s always about how they can’t find the time to do all that they think they […]
Helping Managers Coach…
I suspect we all agree that coaching is important to the development of our people, and our own personal development. Perhaps a small number of people don’t really understand why it’s so important, but agree because it’s fashionable. But now we get into some of the dicey areas, moving beyond the theoretical statement about coaching, to making it happen. Most of the data shows: Too many managers aren’t coaching their people. For those that do coach, the amount of time they spend coaching is way too low (some research shows the majority of managers spend less than 90 minutes a […]