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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
Sensemaking, The Foundations
This is the second article in my series on Sensemaking. For links to all the other articles, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. It’s impossible to begin to think about sensemaking unless we have a foundation. That is, a context in which we are seeking to make sense of things. It’s this context that provides the basis for all our sensemaking activities. While my normal inclination is to start with the customer in defining the context, that’s pretty meaningless. All you have to do is ask, “Who’s the customer?” So we have to start […]
Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us
As we look at the world that surrounds us, we are confronted within increasing levels of turbulence and disruption. Whether it’s our personal lives, our communities, our societies, our jobs, our companies, our customers, our markets, our nations. Every day we are confronted with things which we struggle to understand, manage, or take action. We used to think of it as massive change, and change is part of the challenge, but somehow it’s much more than that. We are pummelled with information and data from increasing numbers of sources, and in ever increasing volumes. Some of it is real, much […]
Are Your Sales People “Organizationally Nimble?”
When we talk about critical skills and competencies of great B2B sales people, one seldom hears about organizational nimbleness or ability. Increasingly, however, this capability is critical for sales success. Organizational nimbleness is the ability to understand how organizations work and to navigate them to get things done. There’s a lot of evidence that shows the importance of this skill: More people are involved in the consensus decision-making process. Over the past 5 years, we’ve gone from 5.4 to 10.2 according to Gartner. Still more are involved, indirectly, in influencing the decisions the buying team makes. Customers struggle to make […]
When “A Players” Fail
I’ve been participating in a great discussion on the importance of talent. It’s an area that doesn’t get the attention needed and is critical to organizational performance. Too few managers pay the right attention to talent, both recruiting, onboarding, developing, and retaining the right people. As a result, the costs of this inattention to talent is millions to hundreds of millions of dollars. Talent is one of the most critical issues impacting sales and organizational performance in the coming years! Most organizations do a terrible job in recognizing this. Having said that, solving the talent gap is not the only […]
“Forwarding This Marketing Email Is Strictly Prohibited By Law….”
It’s been a while since I’ve whined about the stupid prospecting emails I get. I could literally post every day–even if I set the criteria “I’ll only post unsolicited marketing emails from ‘Global 1000’ corporations.” Today, I received an intriguing email from a Fortune 50 corporation. I’ll overlook: The fact that our company is already a customer, using some of the services they are trying to get me to buy. The absence of any personalization other than “Dear Business Executive,” (It’s such an endearing greeting.) The 263 words filled with no fewer than 20 meaningless acronyms, technical phrases, that required […]
Customers Are Irresponsible When They Don’t Answer Our Prospecting Calls!
I’m following a fascinating discussion in LinkedIn. You should read it here. The author makes a fair point that executives must constantly look for opportunities to learn, improve, and grow their businesses. He poses the premise they should do this by answering every prospecting call they get–since sales people presenting their solutions will give the customer insights and ideas to improve their business. He goes further to imply execs are being irresponsible in not answering every prospecting call. Theoretically, this makes some sense. Sales people can be a great source of ideas and insights about business. They can and should […]