Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
“It’s Better To Look Good Than Be Good….”
Andy Paul and I were having what I’ve labeled “The Old Fart Conversations About Selling.” Neither of us feel we are out of touch with modern selling, the challenges both buyers and sellers face. Both of us embrace all sorts of technologies very quickly, as an example we both are actively developing AI based tools. Each of us talk to thousands of sellers and customers every year, and Andy’s podcasts reach 10s to 100s of thousands more. But every once in a while we get on a call to discuss “What’s happening in selling?” And we are totally bewildered by […]
Our Addiction To “Busyness,” Not Business
For my entire career, “we” are addicted to busyness. We seem to measure our worth by how we fill our calendars and that pleasant feeling of exhaustion at 10PM when we have finished a busy day. We revel in our ability to multitask, even though the data shows that multitasking makes us accomplish less. We derive great pleasure in looking at our calendars, seeing every minute packed with some sort of activity. And we feel we have accomplished huge amounts with each to-do, task, meeting we check off as complete. We can’t resist the skipping between multiple windows or apps […]
AI And Buyer Confidence
All credit for this post goes to Scott Gillum and his fantastic post: Why Relying on AI Won’t Improve Customer Experience. Reading it caused me to start reflecting on how much we misunderstand about AI and how we leverage it in selling. Without a doubt, AI will have a huge impact on both how we manage/lead our organizations and on how we effectively and efficiently engage our customers in their buying process. Having said that, I worry that we miss the most important parts of those experiences and misunderstand AI’s ability to address those. We don’t yet understand AI and […]
It’s The Little Things That Count…..
It’s human nature to focus on the big things. Whether it’s a BHAG, a closing presentation for a major deal, a big job opportunity, a critical event. We obsess about how we succeed. We develop strategies, contingency plans, prep and rehearse. We are driven to succeed for those big things. We treat the little things differently. We may skip them, thinking they aren’t important. We may not prepare well, winging it. We may not even recognize what they are. Things like showing up on time, being prepared, the thank you note. Even if it’s something no one else sees, there […]
Leads, Top Of Funnel, Do We Really Understand?
Focus on the top of the funnel and everything else will work out. This seems to dominate so much of the conversation I see. It’s not wrong, but it’s not completely right. But this thinking drives our focus on MQLs, SQLs and massive prospecting efforts. We seem to overlook the questions, “How do we know what ‘Top of Funnel’ we need? How do we shift that in our favor?” We cannot focus exclusively on Top of Funnel. What drives our Top of Funnel requirements is what happens in the funnel itself. What’s our win rate, what’s our average deal size, […]
Pissing Contests…..
Yeah, some of you will be offended by the crude title of this post. I just couldn’t think of a better description of something that dominates too many selling conversations. It’s the pricing/cost discussion. Whether it’s the initial purchase, or the renewal/extension, we and our customers waste too much time in pissing contests about price. We present our price, the customer’s moral obligation is to object to the price. Part of this is legit, part is positioning, a lot is that we’ve trained them to object because they know we will always capitulate and give a discount. And we go […]