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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
I Hate Prospecting!
I know how unfashionable it is to say this, but I hate prospecting. We’re supposed to love it. According to many pundits/sales experts, it is the secret to sales success. We are supposed to love and revel in prospecting. I get it, if our pipelines are empty, we have to find new opportunities and we do this through prospecting. But my news feeds are dominated with things like “the Joy of Prospecting…” There are battles about which prospecting techniques are alive or dead, which is best. Is it social media where all the cool prospectors hang out, is it hitting […]
“It’s All About Execution,” Easily Said
I’ve been obsessed with failure recently. More specifically, I’ve been pestering close friends and mentors with the question: “If we know what we should be doing, if we know how to do it, if we know how important it is to our results, why do we consistently fail to do those things?” Unless you are brand new to sales, your name is Rip van Winkle, or you are absolutely clueless, all of us know what we should be doing. We know we have to: Prospect Qualify Engage in a disciplined selling process, aligned with our customers’ buying process. Keep a […]
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 […]