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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
The Handwritten Prospecting Letter
I’ve been tracking some discussions about old school approaches to engaging customers. There are a number people talking about the power of handwritten thank you cards and notes (I’m a real fan of this myself). One of my clients has done a study and has found brief handwritten introductory prospecting notes, with hand addressed envelopes are very effective. For select prospects, they send well researched and handwritten notes–unique to each individual. These are never more than a few paragraphs. They seem to have high impact and generate good responses. Leave it to some clever direct marketer to take this to […]
Innovation In Sales
Innovation In Sales—sounds a little like an oxymoron, something like sales intelligence. I was intrigued by the question my friend Lauren Harper posed on Focus. Innovation is critical. The pace at which customers are changing the way they buy, demands rapid change and innovation. Without it, we will be left behind. We will become uncompetitive, our products and services will be commoditized, we will be left to fulfilling orders at the lowest possible price. Yet innovation is tough–or we make it tougher than it need be. I think the problem is that we have a tendency to associate innovation with […]
How Do All The Pieces Fit Together?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations with very interesting people. Some have been providers of Sales 2.0 technology solutions, some performance improvement professionals, a few consultants, and others. The conversations have wandered over very broad spaces on the topics of sales, sales performance improvement, and sales effectiveness. At the end of most of those conversations, I’ve had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’ve been incredibly impressed by the power of some of the solutions these people are talking about. Some are really innovative and can have a great impact on sales professionals. But […]
Either….Or…..
Management is about making choices and setting priorities. We have to choose to do somethings, choosing not to do others. We have to set priorities and maintain focus. Choosing everything, setting everything to a top priority, consciously or by default (otherwise known as piling on), is a sure path to failure. Having said that, there are areas in confronting “either/or” choices where the only answer is, we have to do both. There’s a great discussion on Focus that surfaces this issue. It poses the question, “Should we focus on A players or strong lead management engines?” I think the answer […]
Paying Attention
The other day, I was returning to the office from a meeting. The drive was a little more than an hour, so I started making calls. After a few calls, I suddenly looked around–I’d missed my exit and had driven about 5 miles further than I should have. All of a sudden I thought, “How did I get here?” In this world of hyper activity, impacting every aspect of our business and personal lives; I think we often find ourselves in the situation of “How did I get here?” We get caught up in meeting after meeting, constantly being interrupted […]
Quantity Or Quality
For those of you that follow me, you may think, “Here’s Dave ranting about quality again.” Not so fast—-the answer quantity or quality may not be that obvious. In reality both quantity and quality are important in sales. Developing and sharply executing the highest quality sales strategies, having very high win rates is meaningless if you aren’t chasing enough opportunities to achieve your goals. Quantity is important, we have to be identifying and competing in a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve our goals. We have to be prospecting at a level that enables us to qualify enough opportunities. There’s […]