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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
“What Problem Is The Customer Trying To Solve?”
Pause for a moment. Look at your qualified pipeline. Start at the bottom. Can you identify the problem the customer is trying to solve? Or the opportunity they are trying to address? I ask this in every deal review I participate in. At least 80% of the time, the response I get is, “They are trying to buy……..” or, “We are selling….” We always tend to define the customer business problems in terms of what we sell, not what the customer is trying to do–whether it’s solving a problem or addressing the opportunity. What we sell is just one thing […]
“Form Triumphs Over Substance”
One book I reread every year is “Excellence, Can We Be Equal And Excellent Too?” by John Gardner. It was published in the early 60’s and is one of the most profound modern philosophy books I’ve read. A mentor recommended it to me, I reread it every year. One line I’ve highlighted is: “Do not let form triumph over substance.” As we kick off a new calendar year, it seems appropriate to revisit this concept. Virtually every sales leader and organization I encounter is doing the things sales leaders and organizations should be doing. There’s the laundry list we all […]
“CRM Compliance”
Talking about CRM is sure to provoke huge amounts of discussion, pro and con, about these tools. First, it’s a huge revenue generation sector for the CRM providers. I’m told it’s roughly $40B/annually. And I’m not certain that includes revenues for all the apps that depend on CRM. Second, in spite of the billions we spend, a friend I trust says there is data showing utilization is around 26%. I don’t know whether those are accurate data points, but I suspect they are pretty close. As a colleague, Kevin Dixon, nets it out, “It seems everyone is paying a lot […]
“You Are Doing Everything Wrong!”
I got one of “those” emails. It was from some self proclaimed expert citing research from “millions” of situations. They posed a number of sales scenarios in the form of, “Are you doing this……” It turns out, our team normally does at least 50% of the things they posed. They went on to say, “If you are doing any of these things, you are doing everything wrong, which is why you are failing!” They went on to suggest they could help eliminate those errors and tell me the few things that we needed to do to guarantee success. The problem […]
State Of Grace
Forgive my pure indulgence. This is primarily for me to help sort out some thoughts and deal with my profound grief. In the past 18 months, two of the people most important to me have died slowly. The first was my youngest sister, Kathy, who passed away about 18 months ago. The second is my best friend, mentor/hero, and wife of 38 years, Kookie. Kookie passed away two days ago. While I have a profound sense of loss and grief, I am blessed by their examples and what they taught me as they died, slowly. Their lessons in living were […]
Sales And “Product Led Growth”
The world goes through constant cycles. Lately, there have been a lot of “Aha, we’ve discovered the secret” posts and eBooks on Product Led Growth and the role of sales people. We can go back in history, as far as you choose, learning this hot new discovery is actually not very new. We have seen it in mobile devices, PCs, financial services, every segment of software, design tools, analytics, consumer products, food/food service, social platforms, and on and on and on. Let’s face it, Hot Products Sell!! There are certain products/brands, where the products just seem to leap off the […]