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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
Our Commitment To “Just Good Enough”
My news feeds are filled with discussions about great customer engagement. Whether it’s marketing, sales, customer experience, there are endless discussions about the principles and practices of great sales and marketing. Writers, commenters are universally agreed on some fundamental principles, whether it’s effective prospecting, being customer focused, messaging, deal strategies, value creation. They talk about what drives high performance, they talk about strong leadership, coaching, purposed, culture, values. They talk about investing in developing people and maximizing their performance. Discussions about training, tools, technology, processes, programs and other things that drive performance and higher levels of customer engagement. While there […]
54% Of Buying Journeys Fail!
This data point has persisted for at least 10 years. Perhaps, if updated, it would be even worse. But 54% of committed customer buying efforts end in no decision made. It should cause all of us pause. It should force us to think differently. This data originally appeared in much of the research around Challenger, led by Brent Adamson, Matt Dixon, and Nick Toman. But let’s reflect on the implications of data and what it means to our customers and our own organizations. These were funded efforts. That is these customers had committed funding to address a problem or opportunity. […]
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 […]