Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Enabling Our Customers To Feel Good About Themselves And What They Are Doing
I wrote, People Buy From People, focusing on the importance of human based engagement as a wake up call to the overwhelming trend to depersonalize the relationship. In comments on the post, Larry Levine and Brent Adamson added some fascinating and important insights (though I struggle with the concept of Brent creating insights–it just doesn’t seem to be him 😉 As sales people we learn about the importance of developing relationships with our customers. The old school version of this was people liking us. The idea that the more people liked us, the more they might unconsciously be biased to […]
Selling Skills
Here’s a pop quiz for sellers and sales enablement folks. Be honest, don’t cheat…….. Raise your hand if you have had a formal training program on change and change management! If you are a sales enablement person, Does your sales training/learning program included formal training and development on change and change management? Our sales training programs spend a lot of time helping us develop skills around what we sell and how we sell. We have endless classes and programs around what we sell—our products and services. We have terrific programs about how we sell. They may be broadly based methodology […]
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 […]