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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
On Sales Process And Other Unnatural Acts!
Last night I participated in a fascinating discussion on engaging sales people. The conversation was one of our bimonthly Sales Smack’s. If you are interested in vigorous discussion, you ought to join these, I always learn a lot, both from what’s said, and how the discussion stimulates my thinking. All the information can be found at our LinkedIn Group. The conversation started with the topic, how do we get sales people more engaged? There was discussion about sales people being lazy, discussion about Sales Process and how it restricts creativity and innovation. One of the most interesting parts of the conversation […]
Does Competition Beat You, Or Are You Beating Yourself?
I love competing and I love winning! Watching the Super Bowl was great, two great teams who left everything on the field. No this is not a post about what we can learn from the Super Bowl, but the Saints and the Colts are good examples of great competition. Competing against a great competitor is great, it raises the level of play, it forces us to compete more strongly–bringing our best game to the situation. It helps our customers, strong competition should bring better solutions. Even if we lose, strong competition helps us, we learn from losing, we learn where […]
Sales Process 2010, Are You Positioned To Perform?
Yes, I’m on that soapbox again. There have been a number of research reports released, all highlighting the decline in sales performance. CSO Insights, 2009 Sales Optimization report is one that you should look at. It’s disappointing, but not surprising. My friend, Dave Stein wrote an interesting perspective, Declining Sales Performance: Have You Had Enough Yet? In many ways, the decline is understandable, though not excusable. We are in the midst of overwhelming and rapid change, it’s difficult just keeping our noses above the water. Customers are changing the way they buy, social media is making information (accurate or not, […]
Dear Occupant, I Value Our Relationship…..
I got this piece of LinkedIn Spam: Hello , I’d like to connect to you to on my professional network on LinkedIn. I am a LinkedIn LION with over 4,500+ connections currently. I would be happy to connect so that we can mutually expand our network of potential contacts. Unfortunately LinkedIn has restricted the number of invitations I am able to send, so I am pushed to expand this way. My profile is at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/Mr. X If you are unable to open the above link just go to people search and put Mr. X. Please feel free to send an invitation, I […]
Are You Earning Great Referrals? Are You Leveraging Them?
Referrals are critical for every sales professional. No amount of cold calling will surpass the power of a great referral. Yet most of us are pretty bad about nurturing and developing our customers as great referral resources. Recently, I took the time to read Paul McCord’s “Creating A Million Dollar A Year Sales Income, Sales Success Through Client Referrals.” I thought I had been doing a pretty good job in doing this myself, but I learned a lot from Paul’s book. Paul creates a comprehensive process that ranges from setting expectations with customers on referrals, through earning referrals, getting the […]
Rethinking The Customer Buying Experience
I’m a great fan of Customer Experience Design. Unfortunately, most of the work in customer experience design tends to be focused on web design, user interfaces and product design. There is some interesting Design Thinking work being done in business process/strategy. I think as sales professionals we need to rethink the Customer Buying Experience. Actually, it’s already being done, but, it’s being designed without us! Social media and networking create means by which customers are already redesigning their buying experiences. Axel Schultze wrote an outstanding article, Sales Process 2010, that outlined much of this. Social media isn’t the only place we are seeing […]