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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’s In It For The Person Paying The Bill?
I received a frustrated email from a colleague the other day. He described a sales situation—he’s selling a solution that creates a tremendous return for this customer. The return is about 4 times the investment — a business case that seems compelling on the surface. But he’s frustrated because he can’t close the deal. It’s actually a situation B2B sellers encounter quite frequently. We develop great business cases for “The Customer,” a company or an enterprise. But the reality often is, the value or the return accrues to one department or group, and all the cost and risk accrues to […]
Five Conditions Your Sales Process Must Satisfy
A strong sales process is critical to our effectiveness as sales professionals. Without a strong process, it’s comparable to an aimless walk—we may reach our destination, but then again we may not. Or we may reach our destination after an overly long journey. As much as has been written about sales processes, I am constantly amazed by the number of organization that either have no process in place, their process is hopelessly outdated, or the sales people and managers don’t use the process. We can never achieve the highest levels of performance without a process. So since our goal is […]
Learning From Our Subordinates
One of the key roles of any leader or executive is to teach, coach, develop our people. Our people are all too eager to learn from our experience, to learn what we did to be successful, as well as to learn what mistakes we may have made, so they can avoid them. “Teaching,” whether formally or through coaching or mentoring is a privilege for any executive. It’s a powerful way, not only to work on specific skills development, but to pass along values, to build the culture, to provide our people a broader context in which to position their contributions. In […]
Before You Pick Up The Phone!
I’m constantly amazed at the calls I get. People calling me, with little idea about who I am, what I do, what my company does. I see this from sophisticated people in large organizations to those people dialing for dollars. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not my ego speaking, but I’m a really easy person to research. Do a Google query, a lot of stuff about me pops up to the top or near the top. In LinkedIn, there’s a complete profile with links to my blog, my company’s web site, and twitter. So it’s really easy to find out about […]
Does Every Review Become A Deal Review??
I sit in hundreds of review sessions every year. Pipeline reviews, territory reviews, account reviews, opportunity reviews, call reviews. An odd thing happens in about 90% of the reviews, they all become deal reviews. Think about the last pipeline review you participated in. It starts out with a review of the pipeline, pretty soon, someone–perhaps the manager, perhaps a participant, perhaps the sales person doing the review, focuses on a particular deal. All of a sudden the conversation shifts and becomes a deal review. Seldom do we get back to reviewing the pipeline, if we do, it’s only for a […]
Taking Shortcuts
We all take shortcuts. We want to find the path of least resistance, we want to get to the goal in the shortest time possible. It’s natural human behavior. Too often, however, the shortcuts we take are the wrong ones. It’s too hard to research a company and individual before a prospecting call, so we just call and talk about the only thing we know–ourselves and our products. We’re pressed for time, so we don’t prepare for a sales call–we shoot from the lip, after all, we’ve made hundreds of calls before. It takes a lot of time to develop […]