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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
How Well Do You Understand Your Customer’s Business?
We know our products, our competition, our companies well. But this isn’t what counts for our customers–sure they want sales people who understand the products they sell, but what they really want is sales people that understand them–their companies and businesses. Yet I’m constantly amazed how little too many sales people know about their customers. They know them at a surface level, but they don’t really understand them and their businesses. This keeps us at a distance and makes it difficult to really connect and engage our customers. It doesn’t take a lot of time to understand our customers’ businesses, […]
Performance Metric Friday–Ideal Pipeline Volume
For those regular readers, you know I’m a bit obsessive about metrics. I measure everything. I look at my business goals, my day to day activities, I measure my performance on my various athletic endeavors. Performance metrics are very powerful management tools, but I tend to focus on Personal Performance Metrics—things that help me manage my own performance, constantly improving. I’ve had a lot of requests from folks on various types of measures, and how they work. I’ve decided, until I run out of ideas (or until I bore you too much), that on Friday’s I’ll choose a different metric […]
Independent Sales Reps — A Powerful Channel
I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about independent sales reps recently. They are a terribly misunderstood and under-appreciated sales channel. Independent sales reps can be a solution to coverage and market access challenges, but only if we leverage them in a way that makes sense. I see too many organizations making too many mistakes in thinking about this channel. They do just about everything wrong, then complain about the independent rep, without understanding the channel was predestined to failure. The biggest error I see organizations make is transferring our cost and risk problem to the rep. Many organizations, particularly […]
Imitation May Be A Sincere Form Of Flattery, But It’s A Loser’s Strategy
It seems imitation is rampant, we’re surrounded by it. Often there seem to be more imitators–copy-ers than innovators and leaders. In the music world, we see all sorts of tribute bands. (I’m a fan of a Doors tribute band, Wild Child, –their lead singer is Dave Brock. I keep trying to convince folks that’s me playing Jim Morrison). These bands are great, but they never achieve the greatness of the bands they are imitating. They always be just what they are, facsimiles of the real thing. In the case of tribute bands, we know they are imitators so, as customers, […]
Selling Is The Easy Part, It’s The Buying That’s Difficult
I was reviewing a sales situation with a client. He knew exactly what he needed to be doing. He had a good understanding of the customer’s needs, he knew who he was competing against, he had clearly mapped the critical things he needed to do. I asked him what concerned him most. He responded, with some frustration, “The customer just can’t seem to get their act together, they keep slowing down my sales process!” He went on to describe how disorganized the customer was. The user wasn’t moving forward as fast as they could–the day to day distractions of their […]
My Name Is Not “Occupant Or Current Resident”
I received a surprising email the other day. It was from some “expert” in selling. The approach surprised me, I would have thought an “expert” might have known better. The email is one of those we see too often. It was addressed to the sender–clearly the recipients were all listed in the “bcc” field. The email went on to ask my help in promoting something this individual was doing. It also asked for the courtesy of a response—so I guess in some sense, this post is my response, though I really don’t think that courtesy was earned. Given the tools […]