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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
Gaining Consensus, “Yes?” “Meh..” “No?”
We know that complex B2B decisions are driven by consensus. The days of “the decisionmaker,” influencers, and financial buyers, technical buyers, and so forth are gone — even though achieving consensus requires many of those players. Likewise, we know the number of people involved in the buying process continues to increase. In the 10+ years since Challenger was originally published, the number of people involved in the buying process have more than doubled. When we think of consensus, sometimes we think in egalitarian terms, “We want everyone impacted to be part of the decision-making process…..” While that may be true, […]
“People Buy From People…..”
I don’t know how many times I’ve read this mantra about selling. I don’t know how many times I’ve repeated it, myself. Somehow, today, I read it in some post, and the irony caused me to burst out laughing! We constantly talk about people buying from people. We talk about the importance of building relationships, or caring, or understanding. We talk about the importance of building trust. We look for empathy, perhaps, even sympathy. These are all characteristic skills in effective human to human interaction and engagement. And we continue to reiterate the mantra, “People buy from people…..” The irony […]
Back To The Office….
After 2 years of WFH or WFA defining how we work, some/many of us are going back to the office. Some by choice/preference, some out of meeting a requirement. Before I get much further, the nature of work, how we work, where we work has changed profoundly–and it will continue to be. For many roles, WFH or WFA will continue, and it will be for the better. As a person who has WFA for much of my career, if anything, I’m biased to that choice. While I have had “offices” in all my roles, I was seldom there. Early in […]
Is Thought Leadership Enough?
Thought leadership is important. Helping customers rethink what they are doing, to consider making a change, inciting them to buy is important. Thought leadership helps us stand out as being different than others. Having a point of view, creates interest. Others will want to learn more. We, sometimes, think of thought leadership as insight. It helps us change the conversation to something that is more relevant to our customers, rather than focusing on pitching our products. Customers want to talk about their challenges, issues, problems, and opportunities. They are hungry for ideas, insight, and new approaches. So thought leadership is […]
Is Attrition/Turnover Inevitable?
Every day it seems that I wake up to read new reports about work, the great resignation, people increasingly choosing to be nomads, moving from job to job. On the other side, we see employers, some of the “hottest” companies of the past few years, implementing significant staffing reductions–while also complaining they can’t find enough people to hire. The concept of company loyalty is a historical artifact (interestingly, we never read anything about employer loyalty to their people). Researchers and guru’s proclaim, “suck it up, this is just the way things are, it’s a new work environment……” They provide all […]
Our Customers’ Stories
Organizations spend millions in creating content. A key element is content from our customers. It’s usually case studies about how fantastic our products are. How we’ve saved them millions, how they’ve been able to achieve their goals because of the what we’ve provided them. Alternatively, there are testimonials. Usually we see them sprinkled through web sites, a picture of a customer or a company logo, with a pithy comment about how wonderful our company is, or how great our solutions are. Often, we have webinars, carefully crafted, inviting our showcase customers to participate. Or we invite them to speak at […]