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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
Personal Referrals — Keep Them Personal
Over the past several weeks, I’ve seen a number of sales people and teams on the verge of “rescuing defeat from the jaws of victory.” In each case, they had managed to get personal referrals to people they really wanted to meet. These referrals were pure gold-opening doors that might otherwise have taken months to open. But then “stuff” started to happen. I don’t know whether it was anxiety, a rush to establish credibility, a rush to “close,” or just lapse of clear thinking. In each case, they took the referral and started to “de-personalize them.” In several, they immediately […]
Crossing The Chasm, Selling And Buying Process
First, apologies to Geoffrey Moore and his seminal book Crossing The Chasm. Several of my recent posts have stimulated discussions about the chasm between our Selling Process and our s’ Buying Processes. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about, ‘Shouldn’t we be focusing on their buying process,” “How do we bridge the selling and buying processes, ” “How do we manage to two processes simultaneously,” and a number of others. These are great and difficult issues. I think the best way to start bridging the gap is to focus on where do we start in designing the process? Usually, when we think […]
Sales Acceleration, Some Thoughts
I’m preparing for a video discussion with Andy Paul. He’s been an ardent evangelist on the topic of Sales Acceleration (You need to read his latest book, AMP Up Your Sales.). I know we will be spending a lot of time discussing the topic, but I thought I’d use this post as a stalking horse to start thinking about the topic of Sales Acceleration. First, I’ll choose to define it in my terms–Andy, I’m sure will straighten me out–but I think sales acceleration is simply “how do we accelerate our ability to achieve our goals.” There are all sorts […]
Commissions Drive Bad Sales Behaviors And Screw The Customer!!
I’ve been at the periphery of a number of discussions about commissions and sales. Usually, they are very polarized discussions, with people on each side taking extreme positions, neither providing useful or data based arguments, neither listening too each other and each reinforcing the others’ positions. Usually there’s one camp evangelizing the evils of commission (There’s one CEO making a lot of noise on this issue in LinkedIn, though I suspect he has not given up his own executive bonus/incentive compensation plan.) Likewise there are those that say, you can’t drive sales results without commission. They’re a little comical to […]
Creating Low Effort Customer Experiences — A Conversation With Dione Hedgpeth Of Apptio
Low effort for the customer, that is! Too often, we get customer experience design wrong–focusing on minimizing our work and effort, while we may create a horrible experience from the customers’ points of view. If we want to drive customer engagement–for the life of our relationship with them, if we want to drive customer loyalty and retention, we have to focus on low effort customers experiences–for the customer. Join me in listening to a terrific conversation with Dione Hedgpeth, Vice President of Customer Success for Apptio. In this 25 minute conversation, Dione and I cover a wide variety of topics […]
Powerful Email Marketing
I wish I were smart enough to make up these stories. Today, I received an unsolicited email titled, “Would you like to blog about sales automation.” Here is the text, the only thing I have changed is the company/product name (I’m calling it Company X). I did highlight the spelling errors. I started to highlight the grammar errors, but when the entire first sentence was RED, I stopped. Hi David, I’ve been reading your blog for several month now, especially I liked the article on [ARTICLE NAME]. I happenned to use these ideas when I built my own business, so […]