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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
Sales And Marketing Alignment Or Integration?
I wonder if we need to rethink our concepts of sales and marketing and how we organize to provide those functions within the organization. Looking back, historically, it has made sense to separate the functions. Marketing was primarily focused on creating visibility and awareness. It typically dealt with markets and industries, not customers. It’s job was to make masses of people and organizations aware of our companies and our products. It created high level interest that would attract people to want to learn more. Typically, it dealt with things like PR, advertising, events, and other methods of driving awareness. It […]
Being A Buyer Is A Foreign Concept To Customers
As sales people, we know what our job is. We have to generate revenue through finding customers who have a need for our solution. We do the same things day after day. We prospect to find new opportunities, we work on deals, helping the customer move through their buying process and selecting a solution. We are constantly working with people in various stages of their buying journey, preparing for meetings, educating customers, conducting demonstrations, doing research, developing and presenting proposals. While each situation is different, in general, the activities we do are similar. We even have processes that help guide […]
Are You “Connecting” With Your People?
I was coaching an outstanding sales manager. She’s committed to her team and improving the performance of each person on the team. She cares deeply for each of them and their success. She coaches each person, having a very disciplined approach in leveraging data and how they worked. She reached out to me saying, “Dave, I think I’m doing the right things in working with my people, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Somehow, I’m not connecting.” Her situation is not unusual. I see managers at all levels who are trying to do the right things with their people […]
Leadership Malpractice
I hate to start posts with a disclaimer, but I will. This post and topic may be viewed as controversial, many executives and leaders will be offended. I hope that some of them have open mindsets and considers questioning their leadership and responsibility to their people and organizations.. Lately, there have been a lot of stories about Better.com’s CEO firing 900 people, 9% of their employee base, in a Zoom call. While it is a dramatic example, other than doing this over Zoom, we see too much of this behavior across too many organizations. Massive layoffs and firings are the […]
What Are The Two Biggest Factors Impacting Your Win Rate?
I get into a lot of conversations with sales people and leaders about winning business. Win rates are too low, I ask people what they think they need to do to increase the win rate. Usually the answers have something to do with product/offering capabilities and competitiveness, and the standby-price. But, as we dive into really understanding what most impacts win rates, we find two factors dominate: First, we are chasing the wrong deals. Second, too many of the deals we chase aren’t real. Both of these are qualification issues, and the fastest way to improve sales performance is to […]
All Of What We Do Is Really About People
Everything we read about and encounter is about some sort of digital transformation. It could be a business transformation, buying/selling, or even social transformation. Technology and automation takes a greater part of our lives. Years ago, usually it was scientists and engineers that talked about algorithms–now they pervade every aspect of our lives. Too often, we seem more comfortable communicating with or through our digital surrogates. As I write this article, I have seen a news report of robots now able to reproduce themselves and an article touting DHaaS, Digital Humans as a Service. We seem to be on a […]