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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 Is The Most Important Part Of The Sales Process?
Recently, someone posed a question on LinkedIn: “What is the most important part of the sales process?—–Prospecting, Discovery, Closing?” We see versions of this question all the time, with everyone staking out various positions (often supporting what they sell). Some of the discussions drill down into an issue, for example the endless battle of social and other selling (would one call this anti-social?). Others look at skills like questions, objection handling, and so forth. Whatever the version of the question there is the continuous exploration of “What is most important?” These questions always present us a false choice. The reality […]
Hacking Sales
“Hacking” is a hot word. We read constantly of hacking–both in good and bad contexts: We’re terrified of people/organizations hacking our passwords, ids, accounts, systems, and so forth. In this case, hacking is breaking in and stealing something. We’re fascinated with computer hackers. Both terrified of those hacking for bad purposes, and envious of those that figure out how to get things done in clever ways. People like Tim Ferris, make millions in helping identify “hacks” or shortcuts to all sorts of things–whether it is learning a language, traveling, learning a new skill, making money, getting fit. We’re enthralled to […]
Our FOMO Causes Us To……
We live in a world of constant distraction, driven by our Fear Of Missing Out. We can’t bear being separated from our devices, constantly diverting our attention to their vibrations, beeps, and alerts. We spend more time looking at the small screen than we do looking at the world around us. We spend endless time in meetings, but we actually aren’t present. As a result we have to schedule another meeting, at which we still aren’t present. Then we muse about why we aren’t making the progress we hoped to make. We fail to make progress in our daily “to-do” […]
Making Sense Of Sensemaking
This is the final post in this series——-YAY! Thank you for hanging in there! If you have missed the previous posts, The links to all the others in this series, please go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. As you might have guessed, I’m trying to make sense of sensemaking myself. I’ve been studying it for some, time, creating some experiments with clients. But I still have a lot to learn. Writing down some of the ideas is helpful to my learning process and my ability to articulate the them. I am still clumsy in […]
Sensemaking: Sensemaking Within Our Own Organizations
This post is the eleventh post in my series on Sensemaking. The previous posts focus on how we can align and become sensemakers in working with our customers. This will focus on how we look at our own organizations. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. As a reminder, I’ve posted a copy of the Cynefin model below. The model provides us a framework to assess our organization and how we best address our challenges and problems, based on which quadrant we find ourselves in. I […]
Sensemaking, Time Changes Everything
This post is the tenth post in my series on Sensemaking. Like the previous two posts, this focuses on how you apply the principles of Cynefin in your sales strategies with your customers. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In the previous posts we looked and how the “context” or domain your customers may be in will change depending on where in the organization of the functions that you engage. As a result, our organizational strategies, our engagement strategies, the skills, competencies, tools, content, processes […]