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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
Sales As A Special Case Of Project Management
It seems all professions have their own languages, short hand, and ways of communicating that is a complete mystery to everyone else. Recently, I was meeting with people in the Healthcare Industry (not doctors), and my head was spinning trying to keep up with the conversation. Likewise, I had a discussion with some Semiconductor Process Engineers, and I didn’t have the “secret decoder ring,” so I was struggling to add value to the conversation. (All this argues for business acumen training for sales people–but that’s a different post.) In sales we have the same shorthand, we talk about selling processes, […]
Start With The End In Mind
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about, We Keep Missing Our Forecast, Deals Keep Slipping. Much of the reason we miss forecast dates and deals keep slipping can be attributed to two reasons: We don’t have a sales strategy and are acting purely in response mode. We develop our strategies backwards. I won’t spend much time on the first area–it’s simply inexcusable, it’s a formula for performance failure. If we don’t have a strategy, then we are driven by responding to the customer–or, more likely, being driven by the competitors sales strategy. In either case, we are offering no […]
Sales Training–Sustained Performance Or The Sugar High?
Every year, US companies invest $4-6 Billion in training (From a person who really knows, Dave Stein, CEO of ESResearch). This includes internally developed training as well as that procured through the training companies. It’s a huge amount of money, yet most of that money is wasted, Dave Stein would say, the ROI of training is negative–that is it costs more than the value we get from it. It’s those darn sales training vendors! Well actually, probably not–responsible training companies and trainers are doing a lot to measure the impact of their training programs and are producing very important results. […]
We All Make Mistakes, It’s How We Recover That Makes The Difference
My last post, Even The Biggest And Best Get It Terribly Wrong, was about how none of us are immune to making mistakes–even some pretty big one’s. Of course, none of us want to make mistakes. None of us want to create a bad customer experience. But they happen to all of us. Our company has made them–a marketing program or campaign that was not well thought out, service delivery that may have fallen below both our and the customer expectations. We should seek to avoid mistakes and errors—but we will still make them. What’s most important is how we […]
Even The Biggest And Best Get It Terribly Wrong!
Today, I get this email, it’s addressed to “undisclosed recipients,” which is really email-speak for “Dear Occupant or Current Resident.” Here’s the text of the email, minus the signature block: Hey, ( I really love the personal touch) Just wanted to take a quick second to see how you are doing and make sure if you had any needs before July 4th that we get them moving now. I notice that as we approach that holiday, many times things fall off the table, and the best way we can avoid that is getting quotes etc taken care of ahead of […]
How Did You Arrive At This Perception Of Our Solution?
It used to be that sales people were the principal source of information about products and solutions for customers. We spent a lot of time educating our customers about the capabilities of our products, company, and value of our solutions. There weren’t many other easy sources of information for customers to learn about our products or the alternatives. They could look at analyst reports–that is if analysts covered our products, they might find a current user–but that was probably a reference we gave them, they’d certainly get views from our competitors, but in all this the sales person was the […]