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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
“Did We Do The Right Thing?” Customer Engagement, It Can Be Really Simple!
We struggle with customer/prospect engagement. We send endless emails trying to engage them. Our autodialers help us make 1000’s of calls, in the hopes that one person will pick up. We flood social channels with prospecting messages. We send endless texts. We know we have to reach customers through multiple channels. Technology and automation enables us to provide ever increasing volumes of messages across all these channels. Yet customers aren’t responding. They don’t want to talk to us, they aren’t engaging. So we do more. We execute our sequences, even thought they aren’t engaging the targets of those sequences. For […]
Fixing Our Win Rates! Improving Performance!
I wrote, Win/Loss Analysis–Are You Learning As Much As You Should? As I mentioned in that article, I continue to be amazed by how casually we treat win rates and how little we understand what causes us to win and lose. There is too much of a tendency to accept what they are building strategies around the volumes we need to pursue to achieve our goals. Just to put an emphasis on the importance of understanding why we win, why we lose, and how we maximize performance and productivity, let’s go through an example: Let’s assume 3 sales people with […]
The Ethics Of The “Unsubscribe”
Recently, I’ve had some “interesting” conversations with the CMOs about their email marketing strategies and the marketing messages they are inflicting on me. I There are different laws, regulations and recommended practices on email marketing, both how one gets placed onto and email marketing list and how one “unsubscribes.” The CAN-SPAM act is one of the simplest/most benign from a marketing point of view. Things like GDPR have some tougher conditions. Somehow in the regulations, one can “subscribe” to email marketing outreaches simply through emailing a question, downloading a paper, or making a purchase. Even if a person is not […]
Critical Selling Skill: Literacy
Reading Is Fundamental has been the mantra of a children’s literacy not for profit by the same name. I’m writing the management team to suggest they expand their services and offerings to sales people. Like everyone, I get inundated with emails and social platform prospecting outreaches. They fall into three categories: Less than 1% are relevant, interesting and I follow up to learn more. About 50% are irrelevant, unfocused, and just uninteresting. They are usually not the greatest prose, but at least I get their point, regardless of how bad they are. About 49% are unreadable. They may be something […]
The Algorithm Conundrum
Everything in marketing and sales is about “the algorithm.” Each of us is a critical part of algorithm’s–actually we are probably critical parts of hundreds to thousands of algorithms, since each is optimized for different purposes. There are algorithms that track our online behaviors, theoretically to present content that is more aligned to interests derived from our behaviors. The theory is to make it easier to find things the algorithms think we might be interested in. Since the algorithms, are designed an implemented by people other than ourselves, the reality is they better serve the designers’ interests than ours. That […]
Settling…….
Our jobs, as sales and marketing professionals, is to drive change. We can only do our jobs when our customers decide their current state is unacceptable. They need to address new opportunities, they need to solve problems, they need to rethink and do things differently. Often, customers incite themselves to change. Perhaps it’s problems, perhaps competitive threat, perhaps it’s being opportunistic. Sometimes there is a visionary leader that provokes that change. Sometimes, it’s we that incent the customers to change, whether through our content at our websites, our customers talking to others, or our prospecting. Our ideal customers are those […]