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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
Penny Wise, Dollar Foolish
My friend Skip Anderson wrote an outstanding post, “The Race To Sale Competence, A Case For Sales Training.” He raises a critical issue: As sales managers, are we so focused on managing expense that we lose sight of the opportunity? Skip speaks to the issue that many sales managers fail to invest in sales training, consequently lose the opportunity to increase revenues and sales success. I see this in too many aspects of business. Managers have become focused on managing expense, not managing opportunity and the inherent risks. Managing expense is important–but it’s easy. In the words of Nancy Reagan, […]
Execution Is The Hard Part!
The phone rings, it’s a concerned executive. After pleasantries, we get down to the issues. Usually it goes something like this: “Dave, I’m worried about our business strategies. I’m not sure our strategy is right, we need to look at developing a new strategy and approach to growing our business,” or it might be, “Dave, we just aren’t getting the results from our sales process that we expect, we need to look at developing a new sales process,” or “Dave, our channel programs,” (or substitute whatever program you want), “just aren’t working. Can you help us develop something new?” We […]
Persuasion
Persuasion—it’s important to sales. It’s important to business. When we want to change something, we can’t do it without persuasion. Persuasion is a simple word, but somehow in the context of “selling” it becomes vile–it sets people off. It brings up all the worst stereotypes of peddlers and hucksters. Customers don’t want to be persuaded, “I feel like sales people are making me buy something I don’t want or don’t need.” Sales people, reacting against these stereotypes don’t want to acknowledge the “P” word. “We don’t do that, we can’t make people buy what they don’t want, we just want […]
Sourcing Future Sales Leaders
A few weeks ago, I got a call from Howard Stephens, Chairman and CEO of HR Chally. He wanted to talk to me about one of his passions, sales education in our colleges and universities. He gave me some interesting data. (I may have the numbers off a little–if there are errors, it’s my fault). For people graduating from college, 50% of them go into a first job as sales people. There are only a little more than 3 dozen colleges in the country (out of over 4000) that have a formal sales program in their curriculum’s. It’s important that […]
The World’s Greatest Salesperson – A Culture Of Pitchmen?
There has been such a great discussion going on at my last post on this topic. If you’ve missed it, you should look at it, The World’s Greatest Salesperson. The discussion in the comments is better than the post itself. As I read the stream of comments, there has been a lot of indignation over the concept of “How Important Is the Pitch” to professional selling. OgilvyOne has been singled out for their lack of understanding of professional selling and reducing professional sales to crafty presentations an pitches. But I wonder if pointing the finger at Ogilvy is just too easy […]
How Would I Sell A Brick?
Well, I created a lot of discussion about OgilvyOne’s contest to find the world’s greatest sales person in my post . We’ve started a great discussion about professionalism in sales. But the competitor in me has been whispering in my ear, “How would you sell a brick?” I’ve been thinking about it, using all my sales professionalism. There’s something about sales people wanting to step up to every challenge. Let’s see, I’ve got to target a certain customer set (segmentation), within that customers set I have to find a customer with a compelling need to buy (prospecting and qualifying), I’ve […]