Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Are We Numbed By Work?
I watched a fascinating short film, “Work, I Think It Numbs You, Somehow.” It got me reflecting on much of what I see when working with executives and sales people. Add onto that, all the we read about the Great Resignation. About two minutes into the film, a factory worker is interviewed. He talks about how so much of work causes you to stop thinking, we go through the motions and don’t have to make decisions. The most startling thing was his statement about how that carries over when we leave work, we tend not to force ourselves to think, […]
“Who Do You Work For?”
My friend Rene Voorhorst and I were having one of our periodic conversations. He’s been leading his team through a remarkable journey. We were talking about an initiative focused on deepening the strategic insights and value with their major customers. He relayed a story from one of his people. This salesperson was in a meeting with a customer, they were talking about a business strategy the customer was looking to implement. The salesperson was contributing his ideas about the key issues, risks, alternatives the customer might consider. At the end of the meeting, one of the customers came up to […]
Our “Success” Blinds Us To Our Underperformance!
Not long ago, I was speaking with the executive team of a fairly large company. A frustrated CRO had invited me to help, he was struggling to drive some major changes in their go to customer strategies but wasn’t getting executive support. As timing would have it, the meeting was scheduled a few days after they had announced record growth, both in comparing YoY performance and current year growth. It was a $ Multi-Billion organization. The executive team was, rightfully, proud of their performance. The CEO set the tone at the outset, “Why should we be meeting, didn’t you see […]
Salespeople, The Help You Are Giving Your Customers Isn’t Very Helpful!
Hopefully, most sales people recognize they create more value when they are being helpful to the customer. Just focusing on getting the order isn’t very helpful, we need to move past that. But do we really understand the help our customers need, and are we providing that help? It seems the help too many organizations think the help customers need is focusing on telling our customers about our companies and our products. They think it’s helpful to share “corporate glamour charts,” focusing on how impressive their companies are. These organizations and salespeople think the process of handing customers from one […]
Do We Really Want Our Sales People To Be Value Creators?
In complex B2B buying, it’s popular to talk about being consultative and/or creating value with our customers. We talk about sales people as problem solvers, working with our customers to identify and help solve their problems. Despite giving lip service to these concepts, it seems our actions are focused on the opposite. Too many organizations seem so focused on their own efficiency, mechanizing our process, and transactionalizing our engagement strategies. We are creating massive sales assembly lines optimizing the order taking process. More than 10 years ago, CEB (now Gartner) highlighted data about how customers were not getting sales people […]
The Digital Buying Journey Is Very Human
We see tremendous research on the digital buying journey. We know customers spend more of their buying journey finding information in digital and other channels. Engagement with sales people represent the smallest part of their time investment. I’ve written about this transformation suggesting we are going through a transformation of sales led, digitally supported to digitally led, sales supported. Marketers are reveling in this transformation, thinking, “More content, more automation tools, more spending…” Sales people are rejoicing, as well, thinking, “Now we only have to get involved in the end of the process.” So much of our thinking is around […]