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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
7 People In 10 Years!
Recently, I had an email exchange with a friend. He was seeking advice about his current role. As he described his situation, I stopped him at the sentence, “I’m the 7th person in 10 years to hold this job.” Without knowing anything more, the problem–at least the primary problem–had nothing to do with him (or probably his predecessors). It is a management problem — or rather a mismanagement problem! Let’s run the math and think about the implications of this. 7 people in 10 years means average tenure of 17 months. Research data shows onboarding generally takes 10 months (in […]
Leadership Is About Personal Responsibility And Action
Forgive me, I’m on a bit of a rant. Those who have followed me for some time know I get off on tangents, sometimes writing these articles to deal with frustration and sort out my own thinking. In this specific article, I also have to recognize, I will probably hurt the feelings of a well intended follower–but frankly, I don’t really care. I am not targeting that individual. (Doesn’t an opening paragraph of apologies and disclaimers make you really curious?) This morning I got an email from a very well intended follower. It was titled, “A Word Of Caution.” The text read, “Hi Dave-You […]
Being Too Smart About Our Solutions
Not long ago, I had a fascinating call with a sales person. He was very knowledgeable about the issues and challenges customers in his target segments faced. Turns out, he had spent much of his career in “operational roles” in his target markets. Stated differently, he had held the same jobs and faced the same issues as the people he now called on. This experience gave him great perspective into the issues his customer faced. It also enabled him to be very articulate about the value of his solutions. But as we discussed the deal, I got more and more […]
The “Competitor” Question
It happened again this morning. I was doing a review with a sales person. It was a very important call, we were discussing the customers’ attitudes, views, priorities, and so forth. I asked, what competition are they looking at, what do they think of them? There was a momentary pause on the phone. The sales person responded, “I think they are looking at competition, but I’m not sure……” He went on, “….I’m really afraid of planting the idea in their heads or of bringing it up…..” I actually hear this too often. Sales people dance around the competition issue. They […]
“TWAM” Is A Terrible Social Engagement Strategy!
Over the past years, but particularly over the past couple of months, the level of TWAM has been escalating. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s my terminology for Twitter Spam (Mind you, I’ve applied for trademark rights for TWAM 😉 This week, I’ve been personally subjected to it at least half a dozen times a day. This new form of TWAM not done by professional TWAMMER’s. Those are the people inundating you with messages promising 100K follower, or other useless stuff. These are sales, marketing and others who are using social media terribly–discrediting themselves and the brand […]
“I Want To Follow-Up Our Earlier Conversations…..”
I feel obligated to put a disclaimor on my behavior at the beginning of this post. I sincerely try to be a good prospect when being prospected. It’s very difficult to prospect, I know, I’ve made thousands of prospecting calls over my career. As a sales professional, I have empathy for other sales people prospecting. Generally, I’ll answer a phone call, if I’m in and available. Generally, I will listen to someone and give them a chance. So I do everything I can to be a good, well behaved prospect. But in spite of that, it’s hard not to be […]