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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
Standing Out When The “Well Is Poisoned”
Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations with frustrated executives. CROs and CMOs want to have their teams do the right thing in engaging their prospects and customers, “The well has been poisoned!” Everyone is focused on inundating our prospects and customers with messaging through every channel. The volumes of emails, phone messages, texts, social media communications are astounding. “How do we stand out, how do we capture our customers’ attention when they are overwhelmed with messaging?” Some think they have the answer, it’s the same answer, “We have to do more!” They believe the strategy is to combat volume […]
What Our Customers Are Trying To Learn….
As sellers, we seem to think the most important thing to our customers is learning about our products, services, and solutions. But there’s a lot more to complex B2B buying than just learning about various products and services. The list of things our customers struggle to learn includes: Why change, what’s driving the need to change, what happens if they don’t, what are the risks to that change? How do they define the problem, how do they make sure it is well defined, how do they assess the current impact of that problem? Who does the problem impact, how does […]
Growth And Scaling….
Our business and sales conversations are filled with the words growth and scaling. On the surface, they may seem the same, both focus on getting more revenue. We, often, tend to use these terms interchangeably. But they are very different, at best scaling might be viewed as a subset of growth. So what’s the difference? Scaling is simply doing more of what we already do. For example, if we double the number of sellers, we might expect to double revenue. Scaling can be a good strategy, but, as we’ve seen, it has limitations. The implicit thinking around scaling is the […]
Pay Attention To What We Say, Not How We Execute…
My dad was a great teacher and role model. But every once in a while, I’d start whining at him, “Dad, you’re telling me I should do these things, but you don’t! Why do I have to do it, if you don’t?” Jokingly, he would always respond, “Do what I say, not what I do…” While he was always teasing me, this seems to be the modus operandi for far to many organizations. They declare certain things, whether at their websites, in press releases, in the speeches/webcasts executives do, in the way their sales people engage and work with customers. […]
Helping Customers Buy!
We work to find a customer with a need to change. They have a problem that we solve, they express a strong need to change. We qualify them. They assemble a buying team, over the years, for complex sales the size of this team has grown. We work with them, identifying their needs and requirements, helping them think about the issues, presenting our solutions/capabilities, demonstrating that we are the best choice. We work on moving them as aggressively as possible to making a decision and choosing us. In the background, our managers are pressuring us. They are conducting deal reviews. […]
Sales Is Hard…….
I’ve been following a fascinating discussion led by David Masover on LinkedIn. David provokes the discussion with a question, What Makes Sales So Hard? There’s a lot of discussion, with many very powerful and fair points. People talk about the pressure to perform, fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of conflict, getting people to listen, pressure to achieve goals, and so forth. Without a doubt, sales is hard! But is it any different with any other job in an organization? Think of any other role in an organization. Whether it’s in engineering, manufacturing, finance, HR, operations, and, well…..procurement. In […]