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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
Helping Our Customers Face Uncertainty
Probably the single biggest issue anyone and every organization faces today is uncertainty. Each of us faces things few have every experienced in the past–at least at this magnitude. We have a global health pandemic, economic, political and social turmoil. We have businesses that are facing massive disruption. We face impacts personally, to our families and communities. We face issues within our jobs, functions, our organizations. They become more complex as we work with our customers, partners, suppliers; just as they are facing the same types of challenges. We, all, are looking for answers to questions where there are no […]
Your Competition Isn’t Who You Think It Is
I was involved in a discussion with a team on a very large opportunity. It seemed an inordinate part of the discussion focused on the competition. People went back and forth on their strengths relative to the competitors, the relationships the competitors had with the customer, strategies to deal with the competition. And yes, we even got to the discussion, “How much discount to overcome where they thought the competitor would price their solution?” But the team failed to consider the real competition and developed no strategies to address these. The biggest competitor we have always faced is doing nothing. […]
Solving The Communication Challenge
“The future is virtual,” seems to be the conclusion many are reaching as a result of the pandemic. I don’t disagree–at least virtual meetings leveraging tools like Zoom, Teams, or the dozens of other tools, will be a large part of how we engage customers. (I actually prefer thinking the future is digital, which addresses the engagement process more broadly than video meetings.) I suspect decades ago, people said, “The future is the telephone,” and the telephone has become an important part of how we engage others. But we, still have a huge communication challenge/gap, the video based tools currently […]
It’s Not The Customer’s Job To Figure Out How You Help!
I am looking for some software tools to help our team. After listening to about 4 suppliers, I’m about to give up, it’s probably easier, cheaper to do nothing. As I reflect on our conversations: We’ve talked about our needs, what we are looking for, and what we hope to achieve. Sales people seem to be nodding their heads in the right direction, I take this for understanding. I’ve sat through endless corporate glamor presentations. You know the one’s that show logos of huge companies and talk about how great their companies are. Those logos are meaningless to me, those […]
Prospecting Malpractice!
There is no excuse for stupid prospecting! Sadly, too many organizations are committed to prospecting malpractice. None of us can escape or have spam filters powerful enough to filter out the stupid, irrelevant prospecting that is inflicted on us on a daily basis. Our emails, phones, texts, social channels overflow with poorly designed and abysmally executed prospecting. The only explanation for poorly targeted, irrelevant prospecting is that organizations simply don’t care or are too lazy to do their jobs. They don’t do their homework in segmenting and targeting, they don’t do their homework in understanding key personas, they don’t do […]
My New Book, Complex B2B Selling
A reader asked me, “Dave, when are you publishing a book on complex B2B selling? I’d really like to see something from you.” I thought about it a moment, I hadn’t thought of doing a book on the topic. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of books on the topic–and look at how little they have really contributed to changing how we sell and improving our ability to create great value. Don’t get me wrong, there are many very good books available, some written by close friends. We can learn a lot from some of them. But how different are […]