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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
What I Finally Got About “Unlearning”
Unlearning has become a popular concept recently. At first, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, I tended to think it a clever play on words. But over time, I’ve started to grasp the importance of “unlearning.” When I first heard the concept, in my warped mind, I likened it to a form of “forgetting,” which all of us are all to familiar with. Forgetting has nothing to do with unlearning, forgetting is just sloppiness, carelessness, and lack of discipline. Yeah, I’m being a little tough, we all forget–but it’s so easy to not to be forgetful. We’ve […]
What’s All The Fuss About Social Selling?
There’ve been a lot of articles about social selling going around. As one would expect, many representing social selling as the answer to every sales person’s prayer. Many representing the complete opposite saying it’s a waste of time, and others. To be honest, I struggle with the term “social selling.” I think it conjures up expectations of managing the entire sales process through Twitter, ultimately getting a shortened link with a PO through Twitter. Others may be looking for a shopping cart function in LinkedIn, so they can get orders and collect money. Discussions about “How many sales has twitter/linkedin/facebook/tumblr/foursquare……. […]
How Is Your Customer Measured?
Ask a sales person how they’re measured, they quickly respond, “quota attainment.” Every sales person know what they are accountable for, where they are year to date, and hopefully, what they need to do to close any attainment gap (but that’s another post.). Some sales people have a richer set of metrics, and will take you through them. We all tend to be very focused on our goals and achieving our goals. Our customers are no different, they have goals and performance plans. Their performance is being evaluated by how well they achieve their goals. It could mean a promotion. […]
Developing Insight—Just Read, Observe, Ask
We struggle with developing Insight. Sure, we need help and support from marketing, product management, and others in the organization. But there’s a huge amount we can do on our own. The other day, I was reading the Wall Street Journal (One of about three “newspapers” I read every evening.) There was a fascinating article featuring issues CFO’s, and other executives worry about. They posed seven questions strategically minded CFO’s care about—which means we should care about them: How does your company plan to grow, through M&A or Organically? What are the dominant constraints that hold back your company’s growth, […]
Shared Objectives And Goals
As sales and business professionals, we’re intensely goal driven. We’re driven to attain and achieve, we want to win, we want to achieve our goals. At its most base form, our goals are to sell our products and services to make our numbers. Likewise our customers are goal driven. They have their numbers and goals to achieve. Whether it’s developing a new product, improving manufacturing, improving operational efficiency, improving market share, improving the top or bottom lines, or anything else. As sales people, too often the way we achieve our goals is totally incompatible with the customer’s interests and goals. […]
Is Your Customer Prepared For Your Sales Call?
Richard Ruff wrote a great article on Sales Call Planning, it provoked me to extend the discussion–with a twist. We know sales call planning is important. We want to make we are prepared, we want to be sure we achieve our goals, we want to move the customer through their buying process, we want to make sure we create value in each call. As a side note, we know these things are critical, but I’m amazed by the number of sales people who continue to “wing it” in sales calls. But effective sales calls and meetings are a two way […]