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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
Falling In Love With Our Products!
One of the nice things about sales people is we have tremendous passion about whatever it is we sell. We believe in our products, we cannot imagine anyone not being as enthusiastic as we are–or selecting an alternative solution. It’s impossible to imagine a sales person being successful without being excited about what we well. Entrepreneurs are similar, they are people driven by an unstoppable passion for what they are building. They can’t imagine anything other than their product or service. This passion and drive is exciting and contagious. Their whole lives are consumed with the products they create. This […]
Performance Management–A Question Of Leadership
I’m tough on sales, marketing, and business professionals. I have high expectations on how each of us performs. I’m proud of the professions of selling and marketing and constantly want to see improvement. In many posts in this blog, I’m critical of what we do, how we act, how we perform. We should constantly be seeking to perform at the highest levels possible. However, we are not alone in our responsibility and accountability to perform at the highest levels possible. Our direct managers are responsible and accountable for our performance, and leadership all the way up the food chain is […]
How Are You “Showing Up” To Your Prospects And Customers?
I know you think I make these stories up, they are so preposterous, they can only be fiction! Well, I wish I were that creative (I’d start writing a novel), but I’m simply not smart enough to make this stuff up. I’m sitting in my office, catching up on stuff. The phone rings, it’s on our main line, so it’s most likely a sales person or a prospect. I answer. “Is Mark in?” says the voice at the other end of the line. I know it’s a sales person, all Mark’s clients and the people he has prospected have his […]
Getting Close To The Customer, It’s About Mobility
One of the key goals of customer centric organizations is “Getting Close To The Customer.” Sales and marketing professionals try to do this, both figuratively and literally. We have to reach the customer where they are, we have to hang out where they hang out. Where customers hang out and how we reach them continues to change. Back in the earliest days of selling, it was face to face–there was simply no other way to reach them, we had to go to their homes and offices. We had to be where they were. Fast forward to today and they are hanging […]
Why Questions Are A Sales Person’s Best Tool–It’s Not Because Of The Answers
Art Petty wrote a great post, 4 Reasons Why Questions Are A Leader’s Best Friend. It inspired this post–it’s been something I’ve spoken about often, but never written about. Much has been written about questioning and it’s importance, particularly in the discovery phase of the sales process. It’s through effective questioning that we determine what the customer is trying to achieve, why, what they are looking for, how they will evaluate alternatives, and how they will make a decision. Sales people are eager to get the answers to their questions because it tells them what they need to do to win the […]
Sales Road Kill
The other day, responding to a great comment on one of my posts, I referred to Sales Road Kill–those “sales people” who either do not recognize the world of buying and selling has changed forever, or those that ignore it, continuing with the same hackneyed approaches of the past (I’m frankly not sure they have ever worked). There are endless blogs, books, and articles about how much has changed. I’ve often said more has changed in the past 5 years than ever before (actually I’ve borrowed that phrase from Dave Stein–he said it originally). I talk to thousands of sales […]