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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
How Are You Helping Others Achieve Success?
We are focused on our own success. Striving for success is key to how we grow, learn, develop and learn. Sometimes we fail. But our failures are important to our success. They help us learn, change, improve. As human beings we are driven to achieve. There’s a funny thing about success, we can’t be successful on our own. We are reliant on others in order to achieve success. It turns out we can’t be successful if those we work with aren’t successful. If our customers fail in their buying efforts, if our customers don’t achieve their goals, we don’t get […]
“How Would You Rate Your Recent Call Experience With Irene M?”
It’s become de-rigueur, after a call to a customer support center, an email is sent asking for an evaluation of the agent. Yesterday, I was having trouble getting something done with my bank. I struggled for a few minutes with some bot, before disconnecting. I searched the web site for about 40 minutes. I struggled for a few minutes with some bot, before disconnecting. I even googled the issue. I tried the app on my phone. Finally, I decided that I needed to talk to a human being. I searched the website for another 5 minutes trying to find the […]
Rethinking Qualification
Qualification is, perhaps, one of the most important factors to our sales success. If we chase the wrong deals, if the opportunity is an “opportunity” only in our dreams and there is little customer commitment to change, if we can’t be competitive–we waste our time and our customers.’ Sadly, most sales people do a terrible job at qualifying. As a result pipeline quality plummets, win rates plummet. And that starts the vicious cycle of finding more deals to build our pipeline, which we continue to fill with junk, and we don’t produce results. Qualification is important to all sellers. We […]
Do You Have A Daily Learning Objective?
I was participating in a webcast recently. One of the speakers pose an intriguing and important question, “Do you have a daily learning objective?” The response from the audience was predictable, a minority of the participants had a formal objective. Some had good intentions, the majority had no formal plan. Later, I started posing the question to others. The responses were similar, but I also heard a lot, “I take the training my company asks me to take….” By contrast, when we study top performers, each person has a formal objective. Some set aside a period of time to read, […]
The “Secrets” Of Sales
Recently, I was approached to talk about The Secrets Of Sales. When asked, it caused me to pause. On reflection, I realized, there are no secrets of sales. We already know all of them, the problem is we don’t execute them. Somehow, I think people look for short cuts, or they want to find the “Easy” button. They think there is something or that some “guru” has a trick/technique that changes everything to selling. But there are no secrets to sales. We know what it takes to succeed, we just have to do those things—and possibly that’s the problem. Selling […]
Rethinking Rev Ops
There’s a lot of discussion about rev ops. In a lot of it, I wonder, “What problem are we really trying to solve?” To be honest, I think much of the justification we use in looking at Rev Ops misses the true opportunity. Much of the discussion is around improving alignment and collaboration across marketing, sales, customer experience. I’m really doubtful that organizational changes solve alignment and collaboration problems. There are countless examples of alignment and collaboration problems within sales itself, or marketing, or customer experience. Simply smashing these functions together under one organization doesn’t solve these problems–and could exacerbate […]