Dave Brock
Dave Brock is the founder of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a consulting and services company helping to improve the effectiveness of business professionals with strategy development, organizational planning, and implementation. Dave has spent his career working for and with high performance organizations, ranging from the Fortune 25 to startups, including companies such as IBM, HP, Nokia, AT&T, Microsoft, General Electric, and many, many more. The work Dave does with business strategies is closely tied to personal effectiveness of the people in the organization. As a result, Dave is deeply involved in the development of a number of training and coaching programs.
Latest
How Do You Stop a Sales Person from Talking?
Sales people love to talk. They want to talk about their company, their products, how their products and services help solve a customer problems. Turn them on, and they won’t stop, questions don’t deter them.
Personal Referrals—Keep Them Personal
A personal referral is just that—personal. The only reasonable follow up on a personal referral is personal. The best follow up is a conversation.
Bad Commission Plans Drive Bad Sales Behaviors
I’ve been at the periphery of a number of discussions about commissions and sales. Usually, they are very polarized discussions, with people on each side taking extreme positions, neither providing useful or data based arguments, neither listening to each other and each reinforcing the others’ positions.
The Product-Focused Company
Organizing by product lines is a very common business strategy. There’s some great power to this, but if we inflict our organizational structure on the customer, making it hard for them to buy, they’ll always default to the easy to buy choice.
How Will You Justify This to Your Management?
Too often, our customers focus on price, consequently we focus on price—after all we want to be responsive to our customers.
Neutral is Not a Strategy
Too often, I meet sales people who are uncomfortable with challenging their customers. Whether it’s out of politeness (the customer is always right), or not wanting to “rock the boat” with the customer, they are non-committal.
Responding to Customer Experience Disasters
As much as we try to develop, implement, and execute outstanding customer experiences, sometimes things fall apart and we have a complete disaster. Everything goes wrong!
Presence
Often when we think about “Presence,” we think about a person’s bearing or how they present themselves. There are some people who seem to have tremendous presence.
What About the Customer?
All organizations constantly face the need to simplify their processes, workflow and costs. But in doing so, they can’t focus solely on their own internal operations.
When All Else is Equal, the Lowest Price Wins!
When the customer perceives little difference between alternative solutions from vendors, the lowest price wins! And that’s how it should be, it would be insane for the customer to do anything else.