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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 We Need A Sales Process Or A Sales Methodology?
Michael Webb poses the question: Is a Sales Process the same as a Methodology? He provides a thoughtful view (though doesn’t answer the question until his additional comment—make sure you see that). I thought I’d dive in because it’s a confusing issue. A sales process, in my view, is a road map to guide the sales professional in facilitating their customer’s buying process. A sales process focuses on deals and opportunities. It focuses on helping improve the sales professional’s effectiveness and efficiency. It is a set of steps and critical activities that has been developed based on the organization’s experience. […]
Have You Earned The Right To Engage In Consultative Selling?
Twice over the past week, I have been involved in some interesting conversations revolving on engaging customers in talking about their business problems and solutions we might provide. The first was a conversation between David Bonnette, Group VP of Oracle, Robin Carey of the Customer Collective, and Brent Leary. We were talking about some of the challenges in Oracle’s Provocative Selling initiatives. Netting it out in my words, “you have to be very careful about how you go into a customer and tell them they could be running their business much more effectively, you don’t know how they will react […]
Welcome To Our New Home!
Welcome to our new home! Starting with this post, all future posts will be here. Please update your readers, feeds, or bookmarks to keep this site in your favorites! We moved to our own platform, so that we could improve your reader experience and to expand the types of things we offer you on this blog site. (Thanks to Jill Konrath for her sage advice on moving to our own location). Let me give you a tour of our new home (This is the proverbial $0.25 tour—I’d be glad to give a PayPal link if you like). The home page […]
Let’s Celebrate: 200th Post!! Also, It’s Moving Day!
Taking a page from some of my blogging colleagues, I wanted to celebrate and thank all my readers. This is my 200th blog post. Before I go on, part of the celebration is to announce that we’re moving. The new location and link for our blog is: Making A Difference For those of you that want to see it “spelled out,” the new location is: https://partnersinexcellenceblog.com Reflections On Blogging: I started actively blogging about September of 2008 and really kicked it into a higher gear in January. At the time, I was really worried that […]
Let’s Celebrate: 200th Post!! Also, It’s Moving Day!
Taking a page from some of my blogging colleagues, I wanted to celebrate and thank all my readers. This is my 200th blog post. Before I go on, part of the celebration is to announce that we’re moving. The new location and link for our blog is: Making A Difference. For those of you that want to see it “spelled out,” the new location is: https://partnersinexcellenceblog.com Please update your feeds, readers, or links. I want to make sure you can continue to follow us. After this post, all my future updates will be at the new site. The new site, […]
Interesting Strategy: "We inspire sales people…." Didn’t Inspire Me!
Yesterday, I got an intriguing tweet. It was from an individual and simply stated, “We inspire sales people. If interested let’s connect.” I have to admit, the pitch caught my interest. I looked at his twitter profile and saw roughly 95% of his 374 updates had one of 3 variants of the same pitch. It got me to thinking, aren’t many of our initial introductions and value propositions to prospects very similar? Too often, don’t we hear: “Hi, I’m Debbie Smith from XYZ Company. We make the best widgets in the world, if you are interested let’s connect.” These introductions […]