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
The Power Of Role Plays
You are probably shocked. “Dave doesn’t write about this stuff, he usually writes about much bigger issues, WTF is happening to him?” Actually, conducting role plays has been a powerful tool that we use both in our consulting, training, and coaching. I don’t think we use them enough. There are a lot of tools that offer alternatives to role plays. We can record calls, they will be analyzed, and provide coaching to the individual, “You asked 6 questions, you should have asked 4, you didn’t swear enough….” (Yes, know my cynicism about some of the advice given by the conversational […]
“One Size Fits All…..”
Each of our customers’ strategies, goals, priorities, culture, and values are different. The specific challenges and problems they face are different. That’s at an enterprise level. Then when we look within those organizations, the goals, priorities, challenges, problems of each individual differ. Yet we inflict the same standard “stuff” on all of them. We treat each as though they are identical–same strategies, goals, priorities, culture, values, problems, challenges. We take them through the same standard “handling” as we engage them and move them through our selling process (forget they have their own buying processes and they struggle with it.). We […]
Buying/Selling Vs Buyer/Seller
Recently, I’ve been trying to shift my own thinking and vocabulary about buying and selling. Several people have asked me about it. I thought I’d spend a little time on it. I believe shifting our vocabularies from Buyer/Seller to Buying/Selling is much more than wordsmithing. It forces us to change our perspectives about how our customers buy—or drive their problem solving/change initiatives. And it forces us to rethink how we engage these customers in selling. The problem with the terms Buyers/Sellers is we focus on certain roles or people of our and our customer’s organizations. By doing this, we potentially […]
Making Sense Of Sensemaking
I was speaking to a great group on Sensemaking today (Thanks Reggie and Tom for the invitation). One of the participants asked a great question, “How do we know/measure if we are making sense with the customer? It’s a fascinating question. I’d love your thoughts, but here are some ideas I’ve come up with: I think it’s pretty easy to measure after the decision has been made. We can measure decision regret. We can assess, “Are they accomplishing what they had hoped to accomplish?” But how do we measure sensemaking during the buying journey? How do we know that we […]
Rethinking Sales Enablement
Billions are invested in sales enablement programs, worldwide. We have tools, training, processes, programs, systems. To be honest, I have a “love/hate” relationship with sales enablement (not the people in sales enablement.) I think it’s a critical function to support and enable sales people. But too often, we see massive failures. It may be failures on the part of sales managers and sales people, failing to implement the programs sales enablement people develop. It may be the failure of sales enablers, implementing the wrong things in the wrong way. It’s probably more likely a combination of failures on both the […]
Being Helpful To Customers
Increasingly, we are learning the key to our success, as sales people, is to be helpful. Too often, however, what we intend as “help,” actually isn’t helpful. Recently, I was sitting in on a call (it’s easy to do that on Zoom, these days). The customer was looking at an IT solution. It was a very complex tool, the customer had some understanding of the area–but not nearly the depth of knowledge the sales team from my client. The call started well. The team discussed what the customer was trying to achieve, why they needed to implement a new approach, […]