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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
If We Make It About Price, We Force The Customer To Make It About Price
This post should be filed under the “I’m not creative enough to make these stories up. ” A close friend is VP of Procurement for a very large multinational. This morning we were catching up on a number of things and he mentioned 3 very large vendor negotiations he had just completed. I should have guessed what he was going to say when he said, “Dave, when are sales people going to understand price is important, but that’s not the only thing people like me care about?” He went on to describe the situations. “Dave, these vendors have been incumbents for […]
On Thought Leadership And Meaning
This will be a bit of an unusual post for me. Usually, I ramble on about all sorts of things. Today, it will be brief. More importantly, the words won’t be mine. One of my favorite speakers, authors, thought leaders is John Gardner. He held many government positions including cabinet posts, was the founder of Common Cause. He was born in 1912 and died in 2002. I’ve been rereading a number of his speeches and books. I just came across a speech I had never read. It was an address to the graduating class of Sidwell Friends School in 1986. […]
Best Person Or Best Available Person
People issues are the most important areas where managers and leaders need to invest their time. More specifically, managers need to make sure they are putting the best people possible into each role, and they are coaching and developing people to maximize their performance in the role. Yet too often, I find managers investing too little time in making sure they are recruiting and putting in place the best person possible, instead bowing to expediency, convenience, or simply laziness. Doing this is the sure route to failure. It’s a disservice to the organization, to the team, and to the individual. […]
Never Apologize For Selling Or Being A Sales Professional!
I have to admit I get just rip roaring pissed off with a lot of the rhetoric–some from very smart people about selling and sales people. “We should stop selling and start serving… ” “We need to stop selling and be helpful…” “We’re not trying to sell you something, we’re trying to solve your problems….” The madness goes on to what we call ourselves or refuse to call ourselves. We don’t want to be called sales professionals, but rather relationship managers, account managers, customer service managers (as opposed to real customer service people), business development managers, partners, and the list of […]
How Much Time Will Our CRM System Take From Me?
I’m working with an organization implementing it’s first CRM system. They’re both excited about the tool, but worried about it. One of the managers just came to me, saying, “The people are worried. As you know they’re already running full out. They want to use the tool, but they’re worried about the time that it will take from their day. How much time should the be spending on the CRM system each day?” My knee jerk reaction was to provide one of my two standard responses, “It depends…..” or “It takes what it takes, man up (or woman up as the case […]
The Devil Is In The Details
I suppose it’s human nature not to look at details. If I look at the pace of business and life, the workloads each of us have, it’s easy to gloss over things. We look at reports, only looking at the summary data, not looking at or understanding the data itself. There are countless examples: Sales people are making the right number of outbound calls, activity levels are right—but if the quality of the calls is garbage, then we are wasting our time. We don’t know that unless we drill down into the details of the calls themselves. For example, listening […]