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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
Conversational Intelligence
First, while I believe there is huge potential with conversational intelligence, I have to confess a lot of cynicism in how it is sold and used today. Sometimes, I tend to think conversational intelligence is an oxymoron. It doesn’t help that some of the “big names” in the field of conversational intelligence give the magic formula for successful sales conversations is to ask 4 questions and swear. This week, following their sage advice, my script on prospecting calls is: “Hi, my name’s Dave, what’s yours? How the hell are you doing? What did you think of the playoff games this […]
Driving Innovation In Selling
How do we innovate in selling? How do we change, adapt new methods, approaches, even entirely new business models to engage our customers more effectively? How do we learn and grow? Sadly, too often, we don’t challenge ourselves with these questions. “If it ain’t broke…….” The problem is, it IS BROKEN! Year after year, we see declined in percentage of people achieving quota, declines in our ability to achieve our goals. Customers are, increasingly, seeking a rep-free buying experience. Yet we keep doing what we’ve always done, at ever increasing volumes. Not long ago, I saw an interesting discussion. One […]
Questions I’m Thinking About
It’s customary, on the final day of the year, to set some goals, resolutions. We can’t help but reflect on the past year and think about the coming year. I’ve been thinking about some questions, thoughts that have been running around in my mind–some for some time. There’s a lot of overlap in some of them. For most there are no definitive answers, but we can start to approach answering them, at least within our own organizations and ourselves. Others may come up with different answers. I’m writing these primarily to generate some discussion about these issues, as well as […]
Our Customers Don’t Know How To Buy, Are We Helping Them Learn?
While it’s some years old, we all know the “spaghetti chart,” from Gartner. As a refresher, I’ve shown it below. It’s easy to understand how customers struggle with complex B2B buying. It’s easy to understand how many buying initiatives fail. The reality is customers don’t know how to buy, and have all sorts of things that divert them from their buying efforts (for example, their day jobs). After all, they aren’t buying every day. In addressing a specific issue or opportunity, they may have never faced it before, or it may have been years since they last looked for solutions […]
What If There Were No Salespeople?
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s extend all the trends we see around the mechanization and automation of sales. Let’s look at emerging trends around the rep-free buying experience some research is showing. Let’s throw in a dollop of AI, ML, and a handful of Bots. Let’s pile onto this already intriguing combination a lot of supporting research, showing the decline in the number of sales jobs. We can stir in some trends around work from anywhere, virtual selling, and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking and we can imagine: There is an argument that salespeople will no longer be […]
We Don’t Solve The “Great Resignation” With Better Recruiting!
Everyday we hear about the Great Resignation and labor shortages. People, all generations, are looking for something different in their work lives. This has unleashed recruiters. I get emails everyday from recruiters wanting to help solve the recruiting and labor shortage problem. They may be very good, they may be able to help identify great candidates. But better recruiting isn’t a solution to the Great Resignation. People are seeking a different work experience. While a lot is being made about more flexible hours, fewer hours, work from anywhere, these are also just the tip of the issues we face with […]