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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
The “Silver Lining” Behind What We Are Experiencing
In the past 6+ months, the world has turned upside down. We have never faced simultaneous health, economic, social crises at the global scale that we are currently experiencing. We long for things to get back to normal. I dream of sitting in an airport–going to visit a client. Or sitting in a restaurant, enjoying a meal with friends, or going to a concert or the theater, or getting back into the gym. It’s natural to want to get back to our “lives.” But, the pandemic, has created a tremendous opportunity—individually and organizationally. It is forcing us to disrupt ourselves, […]
Is Prospecting Really The Toughest Thing In Sales?
Was just reading yet another post with “market data” declaring prospecting the most difficult aspect of sales. Thousands of blog posts about both the difficulty and importance of prospecting have been published in the past 5-7 years. But is it really tougher than anything else in selling or are we just making it much tougher than it need be? Or possibly our problems are that too many sales people just don’t want to prospect? They want to be handed qualified leads–ideally qualified to the point that all the sales person need to is ask for a PO. Or possibly we […]
Who Are You Learning From?
Yeah, I know I’m dating myself, but I’d like to paraphrase a line from the 1980 Johnny Lee Song, Looking For Love. There’s the famous line, “Looking for love in all the wrong places….” Too often, I think we are looking to learn in all the wrong places. (I’ll come back to those who aren’t even looking to learn.) We, often, tend to overlook great people and places to learn from. Too often, we look to experience. Or with social media, to those with some sort of fame or voice. “They have 10 years more experience than me, they must […]
What Do I Do With The Answers To These Questions?
I had a fascinating call with a young sales person. He’d been reading a lot of my blogs, particularly on the “customer’s why.” He had been trying to apply the concepts in improving his customer conversations. “Dave,” he asked, “I tried everything you suggested in your blogs. I really tried to understand what the customer faced, whey they needed to change, what the consequences of not changing might be. I drilled down in understanding their business and how they felt about what they face. “But, after the conversation, I had all this information and didn’t know what to do with […]
What Is The Customer Completing In Their Buying Journey?
Right now, open up your CRM system. Go to the opportunity tab, look at your sales process steps. It will probably reflect critical stages and selling activities, enabling you to move through your process. Probably, it also creates a “probability assessment,” that is a likelihood of winning. Unless your system has been modified, it measure your progress through the selling cycle. For example, the probability of an opportunity in prospecting is much less than qualifying, which is less than that for proposing, and in turn less than that for closing. It measures your progress through the sales process, but not […]
The LinkedIn Algorithm
I was talking to Amy. “Dave,” she said, “Your posts aren’t optimized For the LinkedIn algorithm” “You could get 10 times more likes and comments If you just write for the algorithm” I appreciated Amy’s idea, she’s a rockstar. But I wondered, Is that the point? Do I write for LinkedIn’s algorithm? Do I write for likes and comments? Particularly when, most of the comments are… “You’re the man, Dave!” I guess LinkedIn’s algorithm, doesn’t like substantive conversation. But curious, I studied the algorithm. I think LinkedIn has a literary bias. Perhaps it’s Iambic Pentameter. It doesn’t appear to look […]