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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
Should You Mandate One On One’s?
Jon Birdsong, CEO of WideAngle raised a fascinating question in a post: Should You Mandate One On One Meetings? My immediate reaction is if the manager and sales person are conducting these meetings correctly, the value of the meetings becomes so great that mandating them is a moot point. Each looks forward to the meeting because each is learning and growing. The meetings are helpful to both in growing and achieving their goals. As a result, the meetings become a valuable use of each person’s time. They can’t imagine not having them. Unfortunately, too often this isn’t the case. Both […]
Killing The Conversation
Over the past couple of days, I’ve participated–at a distance–in an interesting conversation. Let me clarify, the conversation was interesting, but the dynamic of the conversation and what destroyed it was more interesting. To provide some background, the conversation was on LinkedIn, I had gotten involved because it was about an article I had written that a friend had shared. It stimulated a lot of comments–both pro and con. I could have easily imagined the conversation being a voice to voice, or face to face conversation. What was fascinating was to watch the “visual dynamic” of the conversation. Without even […]
Future Of Selling, Glass Half Full Or Half Empty?
There seem to be a couple of prevailing schools of thought promoted by self proclaimed experts on the Future of Selling. An increasingly dominant one has a very negative view of selling (ironically, promoted by many who sell their products/services to the sales function). While I may be overstating it, their view is the majority of sales people are mediocre to outright bad. It seems to have the premise, “we can’t expect substantive improvement in sales people performance, so let’s focus on the tools and techniques those mediocre sales people can use to drive revenue.” In this world, the strategy […]
Are You Selfish Enough To Succeed?
Let’s face it, we care about what we care about–usually, it’s about ourselves. Are we achieving our goals, are we getting the things done that are important to us? It’s our highest priority. Not that we are bad people or don’t care about others, but we are fundamentally driven by what is important to us and our abilities to achieve our own goals. Each of us is different–some are driven by recognition, some are driven by money, some are driven by power, some by contribution. The list goes on, each of us is different. The one common thing is we […]
“94% Of Buyers Research On-Line…” SO WHAT!!
As a warning, I’m on a rampage and am channeling my inner Keenan, so I’m likely to explode and use strong language. I’m seeing all the tired old statistics circulating again. The numbers are all over the place: Customers are 57-92% through the buying process before engaging sales. 72-94% of buyers are B2B buyers are researching on line. 68% of B2B buyers now purchase goods on line. There are endless amounts of data saying that B2B buyers are letting their fingers walk through Google at some point in their buying process. There are endless research studies talking about B2B buyers […]
“Do Sales People Make A Difference?”
Steve Burton posed an interesting question on LinkedIn: When a large ticket item 500k + is purchased in a B2B transaction how much of it so you think is down to the salesperson’s skill ? If we analyzed some these deals would the majority just be down to the buyer putting the 3 most well known options on the table and picking the most sensibly priced deal with the simplest on boarding ? My knee jerk reaction was, “Well of course!” But as I thought about it, I revised my position: Top performers always make a difference, but not only […]