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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
Please Mr/Ms Customer, Let Me Waste Your Time, I’ve Earned It!
Last week, I wrote about inspirational customer service. This weekend, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. I went out looking for new cars. No blog is long enough to contain my rant on how disfunctional the process of buying a car is, so I won’t go through the whole thing, but focus on a few low points-and not the lowest, I have to keep this reasonably civil. On Saturday, I went to look for a new car, I had settled on 4 different models, done my research, knew what I wanted in each and what a fair price might be. […]
Inspirational Moments In Customer Service
All too often, we hear nightmares about customer service and how abysmal it is. No one listens, no one cares, they just want to take our money and screw the customer. It’s great fodder for cocktail party and bloggers. Overlay this with the news reports on Toyota and their lack of responsiveness to customer complaints about problems, it’s no wonder no wonder we are terribly cynical about customer service. However, just when cynicism starts to take over, all of a sudden, we experience these moments of absolute surprise that enable cause us to pause and reflect. Customer service is not […]
Collaboration Is More Than A Web-Conference
I was listening to a web-conference today, one of the speakers discussed the importance of collaboration in sales, citing the higher use of web conferencing, webinars, Webex, and other tools. While I have great respect for the speaker, I wanted to scream! Absolutely, collaboration is critical to sales, and business, professionals. It’s always been important, new forms of collaboration are increasingly important. But web conferencing , webinars, Webex are not collaboration — they have little to do with collaboration! Effective collaboration is about alignment of goals and objectives. It’s about working together, perhaps in different ways than we have in […]
Do Great Sales People Make Great Sales Managers?
Do great sales people make great sales managers? This is a debate that never seems to end, I’ve written about it before, over the past few weeks, I don’t know how many posts I read about the topic. There is a real problem, too many times, we take great sales people and move them into sales management roles. Some succeed, some fail. Move anyone into any management job, some succeed, some fail. The real issues are: Do we know what skills, capabilities, experiences, and mentality do we want in a sales manager? Do we have a profile of what the ideal […]
An Innovative Approach To Sales Training?
The web provides endless amusement in understanding new approaches to selling. I recently found the following post in a sales training discussion blog I participate in. It was posted as “Huge Favor:” Hi! My name is Melanie and I need a huge favor. I just started a new sales job providing (Some product from a big company). As part of my requirements for graduating from training I need 10 referrals to let me call them to present the offer. You do not have to buy anything at all. (Of course, you can if you want to and I can get you […]
Sales, The Toughest, Most Visible Job In A Company!
Recently, I’ve been engaged in a number of discussions about how tough a job sales is. The issues usually involve: “We have the highest risk job in the company, if we don’t hit our numbers, we’re gone!” Or it is: “Our performance is visible to everyone in the company, they see whether we make our numbers or not, no one else has that visibility.” Or it is: “Without us, nothing happens, we are the most critical and criticized function in the organization?” I worry about these claims–complaints. In the best case, they are ill-informed, in the worst they are arrogant […]