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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
Do As I Say, Not As I Do
It’s hard to practice what we preach. In honesty, sometimes, I want to just tell people to do as I say, not as I do. It’s so easy and seductive to fall into bad habits. The press of deadlines, the ever expanding list of to-do’s, the rush of everyday activities. It starts easily, I start taking short cuts, I start skipping critical steps in our process, I relax my standards, I get caught up in reacting. Pretty soon, I find the discipline, focus, and process that we preach as critical to success in business has slipped away. Sometimes slipping into “do […]
It All Starts With The Customer
The other day, I was speaking with my friend, Niall Devitt. He had invited me to speak at a conference focused on the issue: It All Starts With The Customer. It seems so simple and obvious, but too many companies have an inside-out approach to working with customers. We tend to focus on our organizations, our products, our processes, our needs, and our policies. Our efforts are focus on how we attract and motivate customers to buy our products and services. Our strategies are generally driven by this inside out approach. We launch products based on an inside out approach—and we fail […]
The Evolving Role Of The Sales Professional—The Sales Person As Diagnostician
We all know the role of sales professionals is changing. The sales person used to be an important channel to educating and informing customers about products and services. The wide availability of information on the internet changes this–though it doesn’t eliminate this. Most customers are more informed about products and services. They do their homework, searching the internet, leveraging the opinions of others to select a few alternatives they will consider. What does this mean for sales professionals and their evolving role? Lately, there have been lots of articles, some contributed by yours truly, about Provocative Selling, improving questioning, creating […]
What Does Carpentry Have To Do With Sales?
I’m an unabashed Do It Yourself-er. I think a large part of it is that I love tools and hanging around hardware stores. My workshop (that’s what I call that space in my garage) is filled with all sorts of tools. When I was in college, I started buying tools. That’s when we were into Carpentry 1.0. I’d buy the best quality chisels I could find. I’d buy hammers, saws, levels, everything. Part of the reason I bought great quality hand tools, is that I worked my way through college as a carpenter. I learned that good tools, well maintained […]
We Want Your Feedback!
Yesterday, I got an email from a service provider for a Sales 2.0 tool that I rely on for much of our communication with our clients and prospects. After the typical friendly greeting, I focused on the following: “…we know what great things customer feedback can do for a small business like yours. That’s why we offer an easy-to-use, highly affordable online survey tool. In fact, we believe gathering feedback is so important, we’re reaching out to gather your thoughts – so that we can continue to bring you the products, services and support you need to succeed.” I knew […]
What’s The Worst Objection?
I was reading a blog post the other day, it posed the question: “What’s the worst objection?” There were a lot of interesting responses and amusing war stories, but I was surprised that one, the one I think is most significant, was not raised. To my mind, the worst objection is the objection (or issue or concern) that is never asked. Too often, I think this may be why we lose sales, we have created an environment where the customer has not raised a key concern or objection. Objections are great, they create a forum for discussion. They demonstrate the […]