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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
Salesperson As Entrepreneur
When you think about it, sales people have an awesome amount of freedom–but also a huge amount of personal responsibility. In many senses, we really are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs run their own businesses. They have goals, translated both to financial (revenue, earnings, growth), and strategic (share, market visibility, brand reputation, etc.) They develop strategies and plans to achieve their goals, invest in resources (people, facilities, capital, etc.) to execute the plans. Great entrepreneurs are relentless, driven, disciplined and focused. They make no personal excuses, and focus on optimizing the deployment of resources and performance within their organizations. Being an entrepreneur gives […]
Unique, Differentiated? But Are You Relevant?
It’s critical that we differentiate our offerings and solutions from the alternatives the customer is considering. Marketing, product management, and sales all spend endless hours trying to figure out that differentiation, to create that edge. But too often we get it wrong. We focus on unique features and functions of our products, how our approach is different and better. About a year ago, someone shared a differentiation document their product management team had put together. It was 200 pages. It went through each screen and each field of their software product. It had very valuable tips like, “The way the […]
Why Do You Sell?
The other day I was having a conversation with someone. He asked a very intriguing question, “Why do you do what you do?” He was referring to my businesses and how I work. It got me to thinking, we each need to reflect periodically about the choices we make in our lives and careers. It’s easy to get distracted by all the activities and the sheer momentum of work, but if we don’t reflect periodically, we lose our ways. As a result, our effectiveness plummets. We start putting in the hours, but they have no meaning and it becomes work–drudgery. Why […]
Losing The Negotiation Before It Starts!
Sales people seem to be obsessed with negotiation. They read books, they take all sorts of classes, they strategize “negotiation” sessions. Oddly, when I push on the negotiation issue, most negotiations that sales people focus on is about price. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been involved in a lot of very complex negotiations for very complex deals and projects. Price is always an element, but there are a whole number of other elements–actually usually focused on ensuring each party has thought through things and is committed to shared success. There are lots of scenarios that require very complex negotiations, but for most […]
Inside Sales Is Only Great For Transactional Commoditized Products!
Not long ago, I was meeting with the top management team of large organization. They had traditionally, had a large field sales organization. The performance of the organization was OK, they were making the numbers, but increasingly challenged. Sales people were just overworked, stretched very thin. Volumes and expectations were increasing. The needs for recruiting and bringing more sales people on board were skyrocketing. And the costs of selling were starting to spiral out of control. The top management team was asking me what to do. I know they were thinking, how can we make our field sales people sell […]
Scroll Factor And Problem Solving
Email is such a powerful tool for communicating. Properly used, it can really facilitate our communication, but like any tool, it’s a double edged sword, it can cause us to screw up at the speed of light (or at least at the speed of our web connections.) I’m starting to become more aware of a problem that I’m sure has existed for a long time. I call it the “scroll factor.” You know what I mean, it’s one of those endlessly long message streams, with everyone piling on. It starts out simply with someone, let’s call him John, sending an email: […]