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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 Bumper Cars Teaches Me About Selling
This past weekend, we went to an amusement park. One of the rides I always enjoy is “Bumper Cars.” At this park, the ride was set up differently, there was basically a oval course, the objective was to get around the course as quickly as possible. It was fascinating to watch the different approaches people took. Some looked at the course, realizing if they went to the center, they would have the least distance to cover. They raced to the center and tried to cover ground as quickly as possible. Because a lot of people had the same strategy, the center […]
What Conversations Are You Starting?
Usually in sales, we aren’t starting conversations–we’re pursuing them or following up. Perhaps, it’s a query from a prospect and we follow up, qualifying them and moving forward. Sometimes we reach out to try to determine if the customer is interested in what we have to sell–too often with bad results. But really we only get engaged once the customer has determined they have a problem and they want to do something about it. What if we changed, what if we took the leadership and initiated things? What conversations are you starting? By this, I mean, how are you approaching […]
Thinking About Sales Professional Development
A few days ago I wrote a post, Should We Promote Our Best Sales People To Managers? It stirred some interesting debate, but one of the arguments that struck me centered around, “How do we retain our best people?” Moving a sales person into a management role in order to retain them is not necessarily a good idea, but the discussion about retaining and growing our sales people is an important discussion that I think is too often ignored. Leaders, sales or otherwise, have a responsibility for developing their people—both to achieve the highest levels of performance in their current […]
Expert Advice On Direct Marketing: SPAM Is The New Best Practice!
I just received this unsolicited email from someone I have never heard of, about something I have absolutely no interest in. They were soliciting my help in writing a blog post about them. It turns out, I thought it was an outstanding suggestion, though probably not for the reasons they suggest. Here’s the email: “Good afternoon. Please find attached two press releases related to XXX’s presence at the upcoming DMA conference in San Francisco and an exciting new product that one of their companies, YYY Solutions, is debuting. This innovative new printing process allows lenticular technology to be applied to direct […]
Leadership Development And Succession
Normally, I refrain from commenting on specific organizations, particularly when they are clients, and I’m going to be critical. But I have to applaud Jack Welch’s comments at the World Business Forum on the way HP’s Board has handled (or not handled) leadership development and succession planning. But the issue is not really about HP’s Board or Jack Welch, that’s just a convenient example. It’s an issue that should be at the forefront of every leader’s mind. Paraphasing Welch, “One of the primary jobs of leaders is to prepare the next generation of leadership.” It’s the responsibility of leaders at […]
Selling Is About People!
As I re-read the title of this post, it somehow seems a little odd to be reminding sales people that sales is about people. We are in a people to people business, our job is to connect with people effectively. In working with them, we tend to focus on their role in the organization and in a specific opportunity we are pursuing. For example, we may focus on Mary, the CIO, her priorities for providing information technology services within her organization. We present our solutions in the context of her priorities and goals for the organization, we stay very business […]