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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
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 […]
Considering “Irony”
We seem to be in a headlong rush to automate and depersonalize our marketing and sales engagement. It seems the future is “virtual” biasing whatever interaction we have with customers to being action at a distance through Zoom, Teams, or other platforms. We are automating our customer engagement processes, citing customer preference for “rep-less buying” experiences, ignoring the high levels of buyer regret, based on those rep-less experiences. We seem oblivious to the customer confusion, overwhelm, and uncertainty, despite the data around sensemaking and decision confidence. We seem to be racing to dehumanizing organizations and the buying experience, focusing on […]
RFP’s?
I was doing a Q&A after a keynote at a SKO. It was a very sharp group of sales people committed to improvement. A question came up, “Dave you talk about how we differentiate ourselves through creating value with the customer, helping them make sense of what they are trying to achieve, helping them have great confidence in their decision. But a large part of our business is RFP’s. We’re constrained by the structure of the process of the RFP’s, how do we help customers with that.?” It’s a great/challenging question, particularly for sales people doing government and public sector […]
How Do We Do Better?
Numbers are important in sales. Our goals are based on the numbers. KPI’s are based on the numbers. We claim to be numbers driven. And, too often, we miss the numbers. We don’t hit our revenue goals, we don’t have enough pipeline, we aren’t getting the results from our prospecting. There’s the easy, universal answer to these challenges. It’s what most managers do. As sales people, we know what the manager is going to say before we even walk into the “coaching” session. The universal answer is “do more!” To solve quota problems, we need to chase more opportunities, we […]
“Customers hate…..[Fill In The Blank]…”
All my news feeds are filled with guru’s talking about how much customers hate certain sales approaches. Some of the most fashionable are: Cold calling, prospecting, any kind of email, social channels, pitches, sales people, ……. The lists go on and on. declaring the dissatisfaction with everything we do in selling. Pretty soon we are tempted to throw up our hands in frustration and just wait for inbound calls. Oh, but they hate that too! So then we start declaring the death of sales, with customers going on their rep free digital buying journey’s. Oops, those are filled with buyer’s […]