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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
Productive Disagreement
Wherever we turn, it seems we are becoming increasingly disagreeable and polarized. Whether socially, politically, or in our businesses, we struggle with disagreement. But there are a lot of problems with disagreement–or at least our ability to understand and manage disagreements, productively. If we learned how to deal with disagreement, productively, disagreement provides huge opportunities to learn, improve, grow, and achieve. Disagreement can be very threatening. It raises our stress levels, disagreement makes us uncomfortable. Since disagreement can be so threatening, too often we display avoidance behaviors. Rather than address important issues and trying to resolve them, we avoid them. […]
Why Do We Call Them Objections?
We encounter them all the time. The customer has a point of view that differs from that we wish they would have. Perhaps, they aren’t as interested in the things we want them to be interested in. Perhaps they don’t respond in the way we hope they respond. Perhaps they are asking questions we prefer they don’t. Perhaps they seem to favor something other than what we would like. Perhaps they simply don’t care. The customer has “objections.” Millions are spent, every year, on “objection handling techniques.” We learn how to avoid “objections,” how to “handle” them, how to use […]
I Love Selling!
For those who know my background, many may be surprised. But I love selling–and I love working with highly professional sales people. I can think of few things more exciting, challenging, and rewarding than selling. Yeah, there’s the challenge of meeting quota, there’s the reward of blowing away your comp plan. But that’s not really why I love selling. Afterall, there are probably easier ways of making as much or more money. And quota has never been my target. It’s something I pass on the way to achieving my goals. I love selling because of the challenge. Finding customers that […]
Account Growth And Innovation
We struggle to get a foothold in a large account. Winning that first deal in the account requires us to get the customer to change. To get them to think differently, addressing problems/opportunities differently. If we succeed, we have helped the customer innovate, to rethink what they currently do, and to do it differently. The customer chose us because they felt compelled to change. Once we do win and get that foothold, we seek to expand that relationship, we want to grow within the account. We have a number of strategies we leverage to do this. Retention: It’s important that […]
The Innovation Gray Space
Innovation is critical for all of us. It enables us to…. well, innovate. Innovation underlies change. It enables us to do new and different things, address new and different opportunities/markets, shift our strategies, products, markets. A lot is written about innovation. Much of it focuses on disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation probably overlaps, significantly, with invention. Disruptive innovation represents something that is brand new, disruptively so. Disruptive innovation may be radically new and different products, business models, processes. For example, the invention of 3-D printing has driven the disruptive innovation of additive manufacturing–changing dramatically how things are manufactured. Businesses like Uber, […]
Rethinking ROI
One of the fundamentals in any kind of solution or value based selling is the ROI produced by the solution. Sadly, too few sales people even understand this, competing on cost and price, leaving the customer to determine the business case and the ROI of implementing a solution themselves. And they must do this, both to get approval to move forward, as well as to evaluate alternatives. Over time, we have developed a much richer perspective of ROI, looking at things like opportunity costs, consequences of not changing or doing something wrong, and the less quantitative aspects of decision confidence, […]