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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
On Consensus Buying
We know that most complex B2B buying is a consensus process. Everybody in the buying group has to align around a set of goals in order to make a buying decision. We, also, know the buying group tends to grow. It’s somewhere in the “mid-teens” for large complex buying decisions. As sellers. we typically reach out to as many people in the buying organization as we can. We seek to determine their goals/objectives, understand their issues, what they are looking for, and how we can best help them. We start with discovery calls to each of the buyers, trying to […]
Buying The Way I Want To Buy, Not How You Want Me To Buy
I just received a note from Amazon. I had just bought a Kindle book. Along with the order acknowledgment, they congratulated me on earning a book credit of $1.40. I get those, often, but for some reason I paid attention to the email today. What leapt out to me was the fact that I had to use this credit in a very short period of time, otherwise it would expire. I found it mildly annoying. If Amazon’s systems analyzed my purchases of ebooks, I tend to order at least $100 a month. So I know, that I will be able […]
Trying To “Fix” Our Customers
As leaders, when we think about developing our people, helping them overcome performance challenges, helping them grow; we know we can’t “fix” them—as much as we are tempted to try. We know that our people have to choose to “fix” themselves. They must want to change, they must want to learn, they must want to improve. Once they have made that choice, then we can help them through coaching, learning, and development activities. This isn’t new, it’s a classic part of any leadership development program. And much of our work as leaders is helping our people recognize the need to […]
Time Managing Us!
First, a disclaimer. This post is probably more directed to me than anyone else. I’m struggling with time. Make no mistake, through my career, I’ve been vicious in my time management and priorities. I constantly read and learn to improve my abilities. I invest in tools to help improve my productivity. I delegate everything I can, either to my virtual assistant, someone on my team, or a subcontractor. But somehow all, somehow, seems to be insufficient. It’s helpful, but often, I find myself a little overwhelmed. I find high priority items slipping. I’m a big believer in Covey’s principles around […]
Do You Really Want To Be A Seller?
I was tempted to title this, “Selling–A Calling Or A Job?” When I speak with people who are sellers, I often wonder, “Why did they choose to do this?” For some, it’s the easiest job to get after college. Some are drawn by the potential compensation. For some, it’s the easiest job to get, to often, the bar to get a job selling isn’t very high (this is a management problem). For some, it seems to be a bit of a holding pattern until they figure out what they really want to do. And a small number, usually top performers, […]
The “Adaptable Selling Process”
I went through my very first sales training class in the late 70’s. We were taught the various stages of the selling process. We stepped through prospecting, spent a lot of time on qualifying and discovery, moved on to proposing, closing, and implementation. What I learned and sought to apply, for decades, is no different from what every sales person has learned about the selling process. Training programs have slight variations in the stages, some variations of the critical activities in each stage, but they are very similar in intent. The idea being, if we go through each stage, if […]