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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
Doing The Whole Job
Our jobs, as sales people and managers, are complex and multifaceted. To simplify it, we tend to divide what we do into a lot of different pieces. For example, as sales people, we may look at territory or account management, prospecting, managing opportunities through the buying cycle, call planning/meeting management, pipeline management/forecasting, administrative functions, time management, training/learning and so forth. As managers we may look at business management, planning, performance management, recruiting/onboarding, coaching, training, team building, expense management, strategic planning, working with our sales people on deals, visiting customers, solving problems for our people, and more. In doing our jobs, […]
The Future Of Selling, It’s About People, Connecting In A Disconnected World
I wrote, The Future Of Selling Isn’t What You Think It Is. Basically, it was a retort to those who think the future of selling is about the technology and tools we leverage. Whether it’s Zoom, social networking, CRM, messaging apps, AI/ML, or any of the 1000’s of technology solutions sales people leverage. Technology is part of our future, but it misses the core of what selling is really about. Selling is about people, it’s about connecting with people in some way that is meaningful and impactful to each. But let’s extend the discussion beyond selling to work. For most […]
The Future Of Selling, Not What You Think It Will Be
There seems to be wide agreement that the pandemic and related economic and social challenges we and our customers face, will change selling forever (and I think for the good.) The concept of “virtual selling,” seems to be dominating many of our conversations. Digital transformation, more broadly, covering selling, marketing, customer experience, and other parts of the organization has become a buzzword for business, selling, and marketing in the future. But I’ve been troubled by those concepts, not because I disagree, but I don’t know that I know what they really mean. When I ask people, to explain virtual selling […]
Great Coaches Don’t Give Answers
Both managers and the people they coach often have the wrong impression of coaching. Too often, we go to our managers looking for answers. Great managers tend not to give answers. As people looking for coaching, too often we go to someone asking, “What should I be doing? Should I do this? What am I missing? As coaches, we tend to feel we have to provide answers, “Go do this… Try this…This has worked for me before, try it….” Usually, that’s followed by, “Let me know what happens then we will talk about what’s next.” Great coaches behave differently. They […]
Helping Your Customers Succeed
I got a LinkedIn message today from a great sales person. It was intended to be a humorous and fun comment, ” The only reason why I don’t click ‘like’ or comment your posts is just I would like to avoid that my customers can see that I am searching for new ways to convince them 😃 “ I deeply appreciated the comment and chuckled reading it. But on refection, I responded: ” 😉 Here’s a different point of view. Everything I write about is focused on helping customers succeed and grow. Through that, we succeed. Don’t you want your customers […]
Reinventing Selling!
The pandemic, social change, and economic crises impact all of us, personally, organizationally, and how we engage our customers. It has forced each of us to rethink, reset, and change. We all know that selling is changing profoundly. As much as some might wish that things get back to normal, we know that normal has changed forever–as it should. And as a result how we sell, how we engage customers, how we work will change–I think profoundly. A lot has been made of “virtual selling.” Many see that as the future of selling. Looking at moving from F2F presence to […]