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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
Replacing The Sales Funnel With The Sales Flywheel
Recently, I reread an article by Brian Halligan, Replacing The Sales Funnel With The Sales Flywheel. It appeared in HBR in November, 2018, I keep coming back to it–something about it is disturbing to me. I’ve finally been able to put together some thoughts about it. Part of my discomfort in saying anything, is that I respect Brian and Hubspot so much. Part of it is, technically, there is nothing wrong in what Brian says (though the physicist in me quibbles), but is this really helpful? Are we better served by changing our model, or are we better off fixing […]
Sensemaking, Selling To Customers In The Complex Domain
This post is the sixth in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into how we sell into organizations operating in the Complex Quadrant. It builds on the previous discussion of selling in the Complicated and Simple Quadrants. As a recap, the Cynefin model is displayed below: At a corporate or enterprise level, virtually, every organization is operating in the Complex Quadrant. In the first article of this series, I introduced the concept of […]
Marketing Success, It’s All About The “Open?”
Over the past couple of days I’ve had an “interesting” exchange with a marketing/lead gen “expert.” I had been the “victim” of one of his demand gen campaigns. As you will see, the campaign generated, not only, a negative response from me, but one in which I stated I would actively encourage people not to do business with his company. His response was, “I always measure success by open and reply rates.” As a result, his view was his campaign had been very successful. I had opened and reply, despite the fact my reply was very negative. While his reaction […]
Sensemaking, Selling To Customers In The Complicated Quadrant
This post is the fifth in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into how we sell into organizations operating in the Complicated Quadrant. It builds on the previous discussion of selling in the Simple Quadrant. As a recap, the Cynefin model is displayed below: The Complicated Context is, probably, one we think we are operating in most of the time. Where the Simple Quadrant is characterized by known known and there are best […]
Learning Conversations
Recently, I was reading a particularly vile conversation thread. Inevitably it was about something happening in the political world. It started with someone taking a position about a certain issue in the news. There were about 80 comments in the thread by the time I got to it. As you might expect, the comments represented various people staking out positions, reacting positively and negatively to the original premise and to each other. The reactions did nothing to illuminate or expand the conversation. They simply were a death spiral of “I’m right, you’re wrong, you are a clueless jerk, you are […]
Great Selling Is Like Great Music
Over the weekend, my wife and I had the opportunity to go to a couple of concerts. One was with a great symphony orchestra, the other was with a college freshman orchestra. Both were playing classics, but the difference in the experience was profound. (By the way, both were far more capable than I, I struggle at Chopsticks on the piano.). With the symphony orchestra, there was a richness or depth to the pieces they played. Each instrument, each player, complimented the other. While some instruments stood out, it was by design, to create a great experience with the other […]