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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
Reveling In Complexity
As we look at complex B2B enterprise level solutions, without a doubt, they are complex. When a customer talks to us about our solutions, we can always solve their problems, but as we look at proposing a solution we pummel the customer with endless questions, “How many people will need this, what are the other systems/processes we must interface with, how should we customize the solution to your specific needs, what are the average loads/utilization, what are the peak loads,…..” Then there are the implementation issues, “We need to do this, then this, but of course you might do that, […]
“This Is What Your Competitors Are Doing”
Every day, I get a sales pitch through some channel. Often, the theme is something along the lines, “Your competition is doing these things (or using our product), we’d like to show you how you can do the same thing they are doing.” Alternatively, I talk to “sales strategists.” They assess the competition with the idea of copying what they are doing. Particularly those competitors that are perceived as market leaders. I suppose the thinking is, “If we do more thing like them, we will win more business.” Both these arguments are so flawed. We don’t win business because we […]
Are You Using “Sales GPS?”
For years, we’ve become accustomed to using GPS to help us get to where we are going. I have GPS in my cars, on my bike, and on my IPhone. I used to use it only for destinations I had never been to before. Now, particularly on longer or complicated trips, I use it, even though I know the direction. The GPS helps me with traffic, road construction, or anything that may have changed since my last trip. It’s useful to think of buying and sales GPSs. Consider it from a buyer’s point of view. They are probably considering something […]
What If We Stopped Focusing On Sales, What If We Focused On Selling?
Some readers will suggest I’m playing with words, I don’t mean to be. I’m playing with your mindset, hoping you consider a different perspective. We use a lot of words to talk about the function of sales. We focus on the organization, the various jobs and things that exist within the sales function. When we focus on sales, we focus on that function and how it works most effectively and efficiently. But, focusing on sales restricts us from a complete view of selling–how we engage our customers most effectively, when they are buying….. To understand selling, let’s focus on buying. […]
Making A Difference, Pursuing Your Passions
As we come to the end of 2020, I want to reflect a moment. Yes, I know we are all supposed to write about New Year’s Resolutions—99% of which will be abandoned before the end of January. But given this year, I want to focus on something else. When I started this blog, about 13 years ago, I chose to call it “Making A Difference.” My hope has been to make a difference in the lives of people reading these posts. To have them think differently, to help them find new ways to achieve their goals, to grow and learn. […]
“For The Loss Of A Horseshoe….”
There’s the old fable, “For the loss of a horseshoe, a Kingdom was lost.” The story goes that the King’s horse lost a horseshoe. As a result, the King was not able to lead his troops into battle, and because of that they lost the battle, then the war, then the Kingdom. We sell horseshoes. Regardless of what we sell, we basically sell horseshoes. What most of us sell is not the “difference maker” to our customer’s abilities to achieve their strategic goals. Very few of us can say, “We can impact your stock price by this amount…..” or “We […]