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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
Value Is A Mystery…..
Our websites are filled with content about our ‘unique value propositions,” which inevitably turn out to be not that unique. We constantly declare our value in every conversation we have with customers, positioning it around the superiority of our products and services. We tend to declare value, without proof and without knowing if it’s what the customer really values. The reality, value is a mystery. As sales people, it’s our job to unravel that mystery. We have to do the detective work. There are at least two dimensions to the concept of “value is a mystery.” The most obvious is […]
Creating Places Where People Want To Work
A new word/concept is creeping into my vocabulary, “The Great Resignation.” I have to confess, I’m not seeing much of this in my clients–at least yet. Some are beginning to talk about it. Many friends and colleagues seem to be seeing indications of the great resignation. The headlines focus on exhaustion and burnout, much driven by the hybrid work environment, WFH and other factors. The pandemic may have been a forcing function accelerating the great resignation, but we’ve seen signs of it for perhaps the last decade. So we shouldn’t be surprised. And we created it! Survey after survey, for […]
On Qualifying!
Qualifying our prospects/customers is critical for sales people. We want to make sure we are pursuing the right opportunity, that the customer has a compelling need to change, and that they are serious in considering our solutions/services. Sadly, too many sales people do a poor job of qualifying, chasing deals that both waste customer and our time. But there’s another aspect to qualifying that we don’t talk much about. It’s the customer qualifying us. Naturally, they want to make sure our solutions will fulfill their requirements. But they are looking much more deeply than the capabilities of our products/services. Do […]
“Selling Internally,” Driving Transformation
We tend to think differently about our behaviors in engaging customers and “selling,” and how we drive change–particularly big change–within our own organizations. But in reality, the issues, challenges, and processes are very similar. We can learn a lot about driving internal change from the very best practices in helping our customers change/buy. But let’s start with some data: An older McKinsey study shows over 70% of internal transformation efforts fail. Mort Hansen’s work in Collaboration shows similar data on internal projects. From the Challenger/Gartner research, we find 54% of committed buying efforts fail–they end in no decision made. My […]
Buzzword Bingo
Every once in a while, some colleagues and I play a game of Buzzword Bingo. We may be attending a meeting, perhaps watching a webcast, or sitting in on an investor call. We listen for specific words that are “fashionable.” Each of us has a list of words we are trying to find, the person completing their list first texts “BINGO” to the rest of us. For example, we were listening to a webcast on “effective SaaS selling.” We decided on a list of fashionable acronyms seeking to see how many the speakers used in a presentation. As you might […]
The Tedium Of Change
Change is a popular topic. Simultaneously, we celebrate, embrace, resist, and fear change. We initiate endless change initiatives. The process of recognizing the need to change is invigorating. We do a lot of analysis, there are innumerable meetings talking about the need to change, discussions of the options, planning for the change. Then we implement change initiatives, often with a bang. There are kick-off or launch meetings. There are events and programs to roll out the initiatives. There may be training, there may be new tools and systems, new processes. We worry about buy-in and resistance to change initiatives. We […]