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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
Solving Our Problems
I’ve been having trouble with a sales person. He’s someone I’ve done business with a few times before. It started a few months ago. He sold my wife her last car. He knows her lease is coming to an end in July. A few months ago, he politely called me (wonder why he didn’t call my wife) asking our intentions at the end of the lease. I told him, “She loves the car, she’ll probably buy the current model at the end of her current lease. Why don’t you ask her?” He politely asked, “Would you make sure to call […]
Seeing Things Differently, Seeing Different Things
What do you see in this picture? It’s a very famous–some people see an old woman, others see a young woman. Some of you may just be able to see one image, you’ll have to ask me for clues for the other. Even though I knew there were two different images in this picture, it took me a long time to “find” the old woman (tells you where my mind is at). However hard I stared at the picture, however hard I tried to block the image of the younger woman, I really had difficulty finding the older woman. After […]
Try Selling Sand
As much as sales people try to sell solutions or sell value, too often they fall back on great products. They focus on product, features, functions, feeds and speeds. Recently, I saw a “sales playbook” from an enterprise software company. It was 121 pages, of feature by feature comparison of their product to competition, “Our date field is structured this way, which is better than the competitors………” Too often, particularly with organizations with great, hot, or complex products, our selling is really about the product and nothing else. We limit ourselves, we frustrate the customers. As great as our products […]
Questions We’re Afraid To Ask
We all have them, Questions We’re Afraid To Ask. They’re obvious, but we’re afraid to ask them. Will we offend the customer? Will they make us look stupid? Are we afraid of the answer we might get? Not asking these questions are what holds us back. Usually, they involve a root issue–not asking them holds us back. We may be chasing a bad opportunity, we may be missing something fundamental, we may be making an error, we may not be contributing in the most important way possible. Almost always, the question is obvious. It’s staring us in the face, we know it’s […]
Stumped
Today, I read probably the most impactful posts I’ve read in months. It’s entitled Stumped, by Mark McCarthy. It’s simply brilliant, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not reading it. I won’t do it justice, but I wanted to add my thoughts to Mark’s. As sales professionals, we think we have to have all the answers. The customer has a question–we leap to answer, sometimes not really answering the customer’s real question. We find customers who have problems, we have all the answers—now if only we can get them to buy. In reality, our customers have very difficult […]
On LinkedIn And Recommendations
Perhaps, some “guru” has just published something about the importance of LinkedIn Recommendations. In the past week, I’ve gotten several requests from people for recommendations. Here’s the bad part, they are people I don’t know! Yes, they are connected with me, but other than what I read in their profiles, I don’t know them. Some of you may argue, why did you connect with them if you didn’t know them–that’s fair, but I honor about 85% of the requests for connection. There are some that just don’t look right, the open networkers, there are people who want to connect but […]