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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
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 […]
On Questions And Questioning
Questions are probably one of the most critical tools for sales people and all leaders. They provide a powerful means of learning and growth. It’s through questions and questioning, we think about change, doing things differently. But sometimes, our questions are less effective or actually weaponize our intent. They don’t help us or the people we are posing the questions to learn and grow. Too often, we ask questions “with an implicit agenda.” The questions are intended to lead the responder down a a predetermined path to achieve the outcome the questioner desires. This questioning isn’t focused on learning or […]
The Pandemic, What Buyers Discovered
As sellers, the pandemic has forced us to rethink our work and how we engage our customers. We’ve seen customers cancel “high priority/committed projects,” and shift funding to “ad hoc” projects that were more important. This creates both opportunity and threats. BTW, this isn’t really a new insight, Hank Barnes has been doing very thoughtful research for years. Perhaps, the pandemic has accelerated this or created heightened visibility. One of the biggest adjustments we’ve made is to “virtual selling.” With the inability to travel or actually meet F2F, we had to find a new method for engaging our customers. There […]
“I Feel Like I’m Being A Pest!”
As I talk to sales people, I’m hearing this frustration being expressed more and more, “I feel like I’m being a pest…” Usually, it’s the result of people being required to complete a series of cadences–email, phone, text, whatever. They are measured by the touches, probably because research says we have to reach out at least 14 times. Often, these comments are about the very first prospecting outreach. I, also, hear this on qualified deals–particularly near the end of the quarter as sales people are pressured to book orders. It’s easy to see how they feel that way. Likewise, it’s […]
We’re All Flawed….
I was struck by a comment presidential historian Michael Beschloss made about General Colin Powell. “He was a flawed, great man…” What a wonderful commentary about a great leader! As I reflected, it seems to me this is a characteristic of great leaders–the ability to recognize they are flawed, but the commitment to overcome or correct these flaws. General Powell made some tragic errors of judgement, but what made him a great man was the owned up to them and worked incessantly to overcome or correct them. None of us is perfect, though too often too many believe we are. […]