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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
Meeting Complexity With Complexity
We are surrounded by complexity–in our business, in our communities, in our lives. Complexity can be, by it’s nature, overwhelming. Ironically, too often our approach to dealing with complex situations is to make them more complex. We do this, because we don’t understand what we face or what we may be trying to do. We do this, because we’ve never experienced the situation before. We do this because we worry about risk. We do this because we worry about what we don’t know. We do this because we may be frightened. We do this because we don’t know any other […]
Selling Is A Human Process
In the past 10 years, we’ve done everything we can to take the “human” out of complex B2B selling. We’ve mechanized the process, focusing on our efficiency and less on the customer buying experience. We inflict mass, meaningless outreaches across increasing numbers of channels and increasing volumes of suspects. Sales growth has become a “predictable” math equation. “If it takes so many emails/dials to produce a conversation, to double the conversations, we simply double the emails/dials.” Rather than focusing on listening, learning, and sharing; we have tools focused on conversational intelligence–but they can’t conduct high impact conversations. We focus on […]
Getting What We Want
Sales people are singularly focused on making sales—getting the PO. In some sense, that’s great. We want sales people to be driven to win deals, to get new orders, to grow our revenue. Sadly, though, this singular focus on orders actually doesn’t serve us well. We miss the key issue that drives our ability to get an order. We focus on getting what we want–the PO. But we will never get what we want until our customers get what they need–a solution to the problem they are trying to address. While this is so obvious, it should elicit bored “Dugghhh’s” […]
The Problem With Our “Discovery Process”
We’ve all been taught the importance of “discovery.” It’s that process where we pummel our prospects with questions to discover their needs, priorities, and their decision-making process. It’s in the discovery process that we actually figure out what it takes to win–earn the customer’s business. But there are several problems with the way we do this: First, too often, we really don’t do discovery, we focus on pitching our products and companies, not taking the time to understand what the customer is trying to achieve. Instead, arrogantly, we leave it to the customer to figure out whether what we do […]
Is Your Solution Easy To Buy?
We focus a lot of our sales enablement and related efforts on making our products and services easier to sell. We provide training, tools, coaching, support to our sales people. We want them to master everything about our products and solutions so they can easily sell them But we are missing something important. Just because we are making our offerings easier to sell, doesn’t mean we will sell more. We need to think about how we make our products easier to buy. Too often, when I talk about this, people think about the ordering process. They think about on-line shopping […]
Not Everyone Wants To Be, Or Should Be A Manager!
The other day, I had a conversation with a salesperson. She wanted some coaching on her career and how she might advance and develop. She said, “Dave, it seems the only way to advance in my sales career is to be a manager. But I love selling, I love working accounts and doing deals. I’m not sure I want to be a manager—but I still want to advance in my career….” She’s focused on a critical issue too few leaders pay attention to. Not everyone wants to be or should be a manager. We need to think of career paths […]