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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
“Can You Make It More Difficult For Me To Give You My Money?”
This post is purely self indulgent whining. But, unwittingly (I hope), too often we make it very difficult for our customers to buy. We seem to put every hurdle possible in front of them. Often, from the buyer’s point of view, it seems like we have to “earn the right” to give them our money. Here’s the story, analysis follows: I’m trying to buy a piece of property. It’s not an insignificant investment, but I’ve found a property that I’m interested in buying.I found the property on one of these generalized real estate sites. The realtor had listed it on […]
“Show Me Your Calendar….”
Let me share a “secret” from my consulting/coaching practice. I ask to look at people’s calendars. Looking at someone’s calendar tells me a lot. I understand their priorities because I see where/how they are spending their time. I look for things that should be on their calendar that aren’t. This tells me what they might be missing. People are busy, their calendars tell me quite a bit about how likely they are to be effective or ineffective. Recently, I coached an executive whose calendar was filled with meetings. He schedule meetings in 30-45 minute segments for at least 12 hours […]
What Should We Expect Of Our Managers?
There’s a lot written about what managers should expect of their people. In sales, it’s usually summarized as “Make your numbers and stay out or trouble!” (With the first being, by far, the most important).) But in reality, it’s a two way street. Our people have (and should have) expectations of us. Sadly, too often, we’re oblivious too those expectations, or simply lack the empathy to care. And we see the result of this through skyrocketing voluntary attrition. The primary reason people leave a company is not comp, but because of their direct managers. Just as we evaluate our people […]
What’s Next?
We spend our day in meetings. We talk to prospects/customers. We meet with managers or our people. We meet with colleagues working deals with us. We meet with partners. In these meetings, sometimes we talk about important things. What the customer is trying to achieve, or what they might achieve. Goals, problems they may have. Changes they may want to make. Where they are in their problem solving and buying journeys. Internally, our meetings may be about a lot of things. Looking at our deal strategies, talking about how we might more effectively position ourselves. We have meetings on deal, […]
The Future Of Selling Driven By The Future Of Work!
I was involved in a fascinating Clubhouse discussion on the future of selling. There were all sorts of interesting insights with some drill downs into the implications of those. We all know virtual will play an increased role in how sellers engage customers, but the more interesting perspective is how customers want to engage sellers and each other. As we see more organizations move to permanent work from home or other more flexible workplaces, how we want to sell/engage becomes less important than the pragmatic, how does the customer want to engage. We are learning customers prefer no sales engagement […]
Thinking About “Rev-Ops”
There’s a lot of discussion about creating a role/function in the organization responsible for “Revenue Operations.” Depending on who is making the argument, there is talk about combining Sales and Marketing for a more cohesive strategy to drive revenue generation and revenue growth. Some will add in Customer Experience/Service/Support. As we consider this concept, there is no “right approach.” Slapping all these functions together doesn’t mean we more effectively and/or efficiently achieve our revenue goals. However, too many people think that consolidating these functions under one executive will drive greater revenue growth. Perhaps the thinking is that having all these […]