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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
Stop Reading Books/Blogs On Selling!
Before many of my friends who’ve written quite outstanding books/blogs on Selling get up in arms, let me re-phrase this, “Stop reading ONLY books/blogs on selling!” Also, selfishly, I want more and more folks to be reading this blog – so please don’t stop. There are a lot of great books on sales and marketing. Right now, I’m reviewing about 15 books that are either just published or soon to be published. I always find something new in each of them–perhaps it’s a different twist on something I already knew, perhaps it’s a tidbit in an area that I’m not really knowledgeable […]
“Checking In,” Is Not A Next Step!
For those of you that know me, this won’t be a stunning confession, but I really struggle with my impatience. I try to rein it in–I’ve stopped tapping my pen, incessantly, on tables in meetings (though my legs are bouncing up and down under the table). I’ve learned to count to 10–well maybe 100, before jumping in on a review. But my tolerance level for waiting is virtually non-existent. So in deal reviews and pipeline reviews, it’s not unusual for me to interrupt, cutting to the chase, asking “What’s next, when will it happen?” It seems an obvious question and critical […]
“Turtles Only Make Progress When They Stick Their Necks Out*”
We often wonder why we aren’t making progress. Our results aren’t improving, we don’t seem to be growing. We may be doing OK, but we aren’t doing great, we just get by. If we really want to excel, if we want to outperform others, we have to take risks, we have to do things we’ve not done before, we have to make mistakes. So much of our business and sales culture goes against this. We don’t try new things because we don’t want to make mistakes. We want to control everything that we do–organizationally or individually, so we script things out–requiring […]
Financial Literacy—Critical For Sales
Financial literacy is critical for sales success. We have to be able to understand the numbers. We have to be able to understand the impact of our solutions on the customer–presenting the impact in financial terms. Yet I’m constantly amazed by the lack of basic financial literacy among sales professionals. There are little hints in all sorts of conversations: “The ROI on this deal is 7 months.” ROI is always expressed as a percent, Payback is expressed in months/years. Or sales people are troubled by the lack of CAPEX budget, yet they never look at financing alternatives to take advantage of OPEX spending. (If […]
Coaching The Sales Process — Deal Reviews
By now, you know my obsession with strong Selling Processes. It’s important, but misunderstood aspect of sales effectiveness. One of the things I’ve discovered as a result of my diatribes, is many sales managers really don’t know how to reinforce the sales process in their coaching and development of their sales teams. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on this topic from sales managers, and I suspect there are a lot more that are embarrassed to ask about this. Often, I when I get involved in review meetings, I find myself in a role of coaching both the sales person and in […]
SBWA — Selling By Walking Around
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman introduced the world to the acronym, MBWA–management by walking around, in their 1982 book, In Search Of Excellence. Apparently, term can be traced back to practices in HP in the 70’s. The concept is that executives get a much better understanding of what’s happening in their organization through informal visits–random tours of factories, facilities, meetings with groups or people/customers. Rather than structured visits, heavily scripted and prepared, the ability to observe and assess what’s really happening is critical to making progress. Today, as we struggle to find Insights and create value for our customers, I think […]