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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
Will Your Supplier Still Be Here Tomorrow?
For regular readers of this blog, you know I’ve been evangelizing rich collaboration and expressing concern about the health of the Supply Chain. If you want to re-read the post: If Your Suppliers Are In Trouble, Then You Are In Trouble.I’m not the only person concerned about this. Today, I read an interesting article in CFO Magazine: Will Your Supplier Still Be Here Tomorrow? The article focuses on the supply chain in the automotive industry, but the issue applies to all industries.Why write about this in a blog that focuses so much on Sales and Marketing? It’s easy, the issue […]
Selling Through A Slump
This new ebook from 11 top sales professionals and bloggers (yes, I’m putting myself in that category–at least for the moment) focuses on simple advice on Selling Through The Recession. Sponsored by the folks at TheCustomerCollective and Oracle CRM, we look at 11 industries, providing the top 10 tips, in each, for identifying opportunities, supporting your customers and growing the business. It’s simple and pragmatic advice for every sales professional. In addition to the great advice, the eBook is Free! How can you beat that? Download This Free eBook Selling Through A Slump: An Industry by Industry Playbook brings together […]
Blogger Of The Week – Dave Brock, Conversation Starter
Thank you to the folks at Social Media Today. I’ve been selected as Blogger Of The Week. They are tremendously generous—both in selecting of me and the flattering profile. They are a great team to work with. Here’s the link: Blogger Of The Week – Dave Brock, Conversation Starter.
Sales Managers Must Set The Example To Drive Change
We read everyday about organizations not achieving what they want in leveraging sales training, implementing CRM, implementing Sales 2.0 tools, new processes–whatever. While it may sound surprising, one of the key reasons organizations don’t get what they want from these programs is that managers, at all levels don’t set a visible example in utilizing the tools, training, or processes themselves. Somehow, they become things that the sales people must do, but managers don’t. If managers are not committed to set a visible example in any initiative, the organization is probably better off not doing it–saving the money and time. Many […]
The Secrets To Losing Customers!
Yesterday and today, I’ve had to restructure a lot of what I had planned to accomplish. Our email server and our websites are hosted by Earthlink–everything went down yesterday. Late yesterday, email came back up–but we got bits and pieces of queued up emails delivered over several hours. Our websites are still down and we had planned to launch some major new things through the website at this time—clearly all of that is on hold, because we can’t start pointing customers and prospects to a website that is not operational. I hate to use this blog site as a bully […]
Sales Managers, Use It Or Lose It.
I work with sales executives and professionals everyday. Many of the organizations have invested millions of dollars/euro/yuan/yen in tools (CRM, Sales 2.0) and training. Yet the results aren’t there. The expected improvements in productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness just aren’t there. What’s wrong, why aren’t organizations getting the results? What does it take to get real performance improvement. At the risk of biting the hands that feed me, the problem is not with the vendors, it’s even not with the sales people themselves. The problem rests with sales management. Let me give an example. Just a couple of days ago, I […]