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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
It’s The Customer’s Responsibility To Buy!
As sales people, we take our responsibility to sell very seriously–sometimes too seriously and we have a tendency to push or pressure the customer inappropriately. However seriously we take our responsibility to sell, it’s really meaningless until the customer accepts their responsibility to buy. But too often we forget this, getting frustrated ourselves, as well as aggravating the customer. There are lots of things that impact the customer and their buying. If they don’t have a need or desire to buy, we have to create that need and get them to own it for themselves. This is the focus of a lot […]
Executing Company Strategy
The sales organization is responsible for executing the company strategy with customers! No if, or’s, or but’s! But too often, I see sales people and managers failing to do this. They focus on the same old things—the same customers, the same segments, the same products. It’s natural human behavior, we sell what we are comfortable with to those customers we are comfortable with selling to. But company strategies are evolving. If companies want to grow, the strategy is simple. Develop and introduce new products to sell to our existing customers Sell our current products to new customers in new segments.—-“You […]
Teaching Our Customers
There’s a lot of talk about the role of the sales person as a “Teacher.” It’s an important concept, but one that’s always been a key element of the sales person’s role. But I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what effective teaching really is. So much of the literature seems to focus on Teaching As An Event. There’s a lot of discussion around the Teaching Pitch. I’m probably overstating this, but it conjures up the image of that single impactful presentation where the customer immediately says, “Yes,” and pulls out an order form. Somehow focusing on an […]
Not Your Normal Sales Presentation
I have to admit, up front, generally I don’t find books about sales presentations very useful. Maybe, more accurately, I probably found the very first book I’ve read interesting, then subsequent books virtually copies of the original book. Somehow, books about sales presentations seem to focus either on, “Building The Killer Deck.” There’s the famous 10-20-30 rule. Or a lot of them focus on “Presentation Style,” how you actually speak and present offering great insights like, “Generally, it’s not a good practice to pick your nose in front of your audience.” (OK, I made that up, but it’s still fantastic […]
The Sales Process Is Critical To Customer Experience
Recently I was at one of those giant events, you know, where sales leaders come together to talk about the challenges they face in growing their business. At dinner one evening, I was talking to a three executives, comparing notes on a new tool each was considering buying and implementing in their organizations. The conversation was fascinating, each had a completely different understanding of the tool and what it could do. Each also had very different opinions about the company that had developed and offered the tool. The conversation was almost surreal, it was as if they were talking about three […]
The Discovery
Like most of us, I’ve come to rely on—and use as an excuse—constant on-line accessibility. Email, Twitter, blogs, instantaneous web access. Imagine my panic walking into the office this morning to find no web access! My morning routine is usually, look at my calendar and priorities for the day, quickly process email, spend some time on Twitter and the various social sites, do a blog post. I spend the first hour of the day on those things, then I head to meetings, calls and so forth. But this morning was different, the web in the office was down! I was […]