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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
The Good News Is Our Sales People Are Charging Full Speed Ahead……
There’s nothing like being around sales people excited and energized with a new product launch or new marketing initiative. Once they understand it and know what to do, there’s no stopping them. They will break down brick walls, they’ll charge forward 200 miles per hour doing exactly what you told them to do. They will go out and try to overcome anything to make the sale. It’s trully exciting being around a sales team with this kind of energy. That’s the good news. The bad news is: If you have pointed them in the wrong direction or have not equipped them to […]
Do Our Rules, Procedures And Incentives Limit Our Effectiveness?
A soapbox I have been on has been to put the “thoughtfulness” back into our business practice. What I mean by this is not being courteous and polite to people (though we should be), but to be thought-full in how we develop and execute our business, sales and marketing strategies. To not blindly do what we have done in the past, but to think about what we should be doing, to think about doing things right, and to do the right thing. Too often, it seems that we go through the motions. Or because we don’t trust our people to […]
You, Your Products, and Your Company Suck!
It’s Friday afternoon, the end of an incredibly busy week, I’m taking a few moments to reflect on some of the most interesting discussions of the week. With several clients, and some of my good friends, including Keith Bossey, John Cousineau, Jim Keenan, and Jonathan Farrington, I’ve found myself in discussions about handling serious, often critical, and sometimes impolite customer feedback or objections. One of the greatest challenges sales professionals face is engaging our customers. We try but can’t catch their attention or gain their interest in our offerings. Then suddenly some feedback comes in, often some variant of “your […]
A Great Sales Process – Elegant In Its Simplicity, Natural In Execution
In response to my post, But We Have A Sales Process…., Dave Stein wrote a great post, More Excuses For Not Doing The Right Thing About Sales Effectiveness. It’s a great post about excuses he hears for not having or following a sales process. Please make sure you read it. I also got some very interesting comments, both on this blog and in other places my articles are posted. An issue that came up multiple times is “how to we have a sales process without having a lot of bureaucracy?” The question reminded me of a lot of things I […]
But We Have A Sales Process……..
A couple of weeks ago, I was on a panel with a number of peers. A couple of the panelists suggested the majority of companies they worked with had no sales process in place. I have a slightly different point of view, one that is perhaps worse news. Most of the organizations I work with have a sales process in place. At least that’s what they say. They’ll even pull out a piece of paper, a flow chart, or show me their CRM system to prove they have a sales process. I’m always curious, so I ask a lot of […]
Sales, Just Like Riding A Bike!
Those of you who know me know that I am a fanatic road bike rider. Naturally, I rode bikes a lot as a kid, and rode at college because it was the easiest way of getting around. But then I stopped. About 4 years ago, I started riding again–mainly to try to get into some semblance of shape. Part of what they say about riding bikes is true–you don’t forget. I live in Southern California–on any given weekend, you’ll see 100’s of people out on bicycles. When I started riding again, I noticed, that even though I could ride a […]