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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 If We Talked About Our Customers?
Recently, the CEO of a company shared the agenda for his management offsite meeting. Agenda: – Review key metrics (30 min) – Discuss service growth plan (30 min) – Discuss 2020 product vision (30 min) – Discuss pricing / packaging (6 hours) 😂 – Harbor boat ride (90 minutes) I see dozens of these every year. Some for meetings I’ve been invited to participate in, some from my coaching clients. They’re not much different than the one outlined above. Yes, some of the specifics are different, but generally, they focus on a lot of internal business topics. The one thing […]
Do We Need Sales People Any Longer?
Recently, I was at a meeting hosted by my friends at Gartner. Scott Gillum made a provocative suggestion, “Do we need outbound sales any longer?” He followed that with a post. As I reflected on the question, I think we can only discover the answer by changing the question, “Why do customers need sales people any more?” Increasingly, the answer appears to be “They don’t!” We see all sorts of evidence supporting this. Customers are relying, increasingly, on other sources of information. They have solution provider web sites, influencers, referral sources, and other sorts of channels to learn about new […]
Understanding Leverage
Leverage is an important concept in business, sales, and marketing. Unfortunately, we spend too little time understanding leverage and identifying leverage opportunities in coaching and developing our people. Perhaps, our aversion to leverage is the negative connotations of the word. Too often, it’s construed as using some sort of manipulation or unfair/unethical tactics. This use of leverage is clearly wrong and seldom produces sustainable results. In this discussion of leverage, I’d like to focus on “How do we identify and prioritize those things that have the greatest impact on our results or our abilities to achieve our goals?” One of […]
High Performance Selling, Putting The Pieces Together
Have you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle? Recently, I was sitting in a hotel lobby. The staff had put out one of those 1000 piece puzzles. It turned out to be a fascinating social experience–strangers were sitting down together, trying to place pieces in the right spots. It was huge fun! Puzzles are interesting, and they are an intriguing metaphor for sales. The pieces of the puzzle don’t make any sense by themselves. A single piece of the puzzle is meaningless, we don’t understand the picture, we don’t even know where/how it fits. But taken together, all the pieces […]
Sales Is Simple, Simple Isn’t Easy
Stripped of everything else sales is simple. At it’s core, sales is about: “Finding a person/company with a need, helping them solve it.” “Finding enough of these to achieve our business goals.” As with many complex things, we can express them in very simple terms. There is great beauty and simplicity in the expression of the laws of physics, a mathematical equation, in a great piece of art or music, in a great book. There is great elegance and insight in the ability to describe very complex things in ways that are very simple. But too often, we confuse simple […]
Looking For Answers In Different Places
This week, I had the privilege of sitting with some of the smartest people I know. We were talking about the challenges both sellers and buyers face in solving buyers’ problems. As we studied research, and shared ideas/experiences, there were some fascinating insights. There were ideas that could drive great increases in performance. But something troubled met about the discussion. To some degree, it was that feeling of “deja vu.” I’m involved in, literally, hundreds of these types of conversations every year. With clients, struggling to innovate and change, with thought leaders looking to introduce new approaches. We struggle in […]