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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
A Script Isn’t A Call Plan!
I’m almost ashamed to be writing on the topic of call planning/execution. It is probably the most fundamental skill any sales person must master. Yet, here I am, writing about it, largely because too many do this poorly. First, I need to define what a “call” is. Again, one never had to do this, we knew “calls” included virtually every interchange with the customer–a meeting, a conversation whether virtually by or by the phone. Calls can be extended to include social media exchanges. I think the one updated concept around call planning may be the need to consider asynchronous interactions. […]
Predictable Buying
In the roughly 11 years since Aaron Ross published Predictable Revenue, 1000’s of articles have been written about creating predictable revenue, and the selling activities/processed to do this. To be honest, too many of the principles have really been twisted far away from Aaron’s original concepts in the book. But one thing has struck me as strange, I’ve never heard any conversations about Predictable Buying. Interestingly, we will fail to achieve what we should in creating predictable revenue, unless we increase buyer success in buying. Yet all the data shows the majority of buying journeys fail, some research shows upwards […]
Misunderstanding Insights
My inbox and InMail is filled with sales people trying to provide me insight: Microsoft and Google have gotten huge results using our products! X% of sales people using our solutions exceed their goals, as opposed to Y% who don’t use our solutions (X is always 2-3 times more than Y.) Our solutions will enable you to differentiate company from their competition (I wonder if they are saying the same thing to my competition.) Gartner has consistently put our offerings in the top right quadrant. We have doubled our customer base in the past year. People really love our offerings. […]
It’s Not My Job To Do Your Job!
I get dozens of requests a day. Most are people wanting me to do something for them. They may want to sell me something. They often want my help in providing introductions or referrals. Where it makes sense, I’m glad to help. But most of the time, I really struggle. I ask, “What are you truing to accomplish? Why do you think I even have a need for this? Why do you think these people would be interested in a conversation?” A couple examples, just from this morning. I sit on a couple of boards, apparently people see that on […]
In Praise Of Lazy Sales People!
I’m fascinated by studying lazy sales people! Let me qualify that a little, I’m fascinated by studying lazy sales people that consistently achieve their goals. There seems to be a “macho” mentality in too many sales people/leaders. They express pride in how many calls they make, how many dials, how many emails, how much social selling engagement, how they are leveraging the tools. I read a post from some “expert” talking about the long hours of work, declaring he starts his day at 3 am! ( I suppose each of us could make that claim, regardless when we start our […]
Better Results From Each Activity Or More Activities?
Spoiler alert, this is a trick question, but probably not in the sense that you might think. Recently, I got sucked into a LinkedIn conversation (Yes, I have to be better at resisting clickbait). But it was a fascinating conversation started by Anthony Iannarino. It was on the importance of effectiveness and efficiency. And Chris Eckert provided a very thoughtful counterpoint in the discussion There were several things fascinating about the discussion. First is the observation of the myopic focus too many have on “activity.” This seems to be the mantra of too many pundits, and when one looks at […]