Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Tilting The Numbers In Your Favor, The Tyranny Of “More”
I have tremendous empathy for sales people and what they face as they struggle to make their numbers. It seems the mantra is always “do more.” The solution to anemic pipelines is “do more prospecting” (that seems to be the magic solution to every sales problem). Alternatively, it’s “do more emails,” do more cold calls,” “do more customer meetings,” or “do more research,” or “do more with your accounts,” or any other things that focus on volume. We have an obsession with volume, specifically volume of activities. If the volume of activities we currently conduct aren’t producing what we need, […]
Is Leadership Really About Solving Problems?
All of us, me included, often think a key aspect of leadership is about solving problems. Whatever the problem–a strategy problem, a market problem, a product problem, operational problems, sales/marketing problems, people problems…… We tend to think of ourselves as problem solvers. It’s that ability to solve problems that probably got us promotion after promotion in the first place. But as you think about it, it’s actually the height of arrogance and/or vanity. The idea that our ability to solve problems is the key to our organizations’ success is hugely popular in modern business thinking and hugely off course. Think, […]
CEOs Would Be PISSED OFF If They Knew This Secret!
I spend a lot of time with CEOs, boards, and top executives. Inevitably, profitable growth is a key issue, universal to almost all. Many may be growing, some very well, but they always look for more. Others are struggling. They are growing, but barely. They struggle to maintain consistent growth, or see competitors growing faster than they are. And others aren’t growing at all, their markets are being disrupted, they struggle to innovate and compete. Often, in looking at growth, our conversations focus on overall business strategies, assessing current and new markets for growth. Looking at product development, new services, […]
Selling IS A Service
It seems the world is migrating to an “As A Service” model. Everyday one hears a new (sometimes not so new) XaaS approach. The model, at least as a subscription payment approach, is not new. We’ve had various subscription, rent, lease capabilities for at least decades, if not centuries. The application of this model to different areas, is interesting. Then there’s the SaaS selling model–not applied strictly to Software (cloud or otherwise) that seems to be all the rage. This is typically a high volume/high velocity approach to selling, focused primarily on transactionalizing and optimizing our selling approach, despite what […]
Stop Focusing On The Top Of The Pipeline!
Virtually every sales person and organization have pipeline/funnel problems. Almost all the time, they are anemic. Virtually every pipeline has quality and integrity issues. Likewise, there are too many velocity issues. It seems the universal, go to, solution for bad pipelines is to find more qualified opportunities. That is, we need to focus at the top. We need to focus on prospecting, we need to develop and qualify new opportunities. 80% of the experts, the majority of blogs, say the same thing. Post after post, including many I’ve written, will pummel you with prospect, prospect, prospect! Google “prospecting” and you […]
Product Centric Selling, It Really Is About Us!
I’ve been having an email conversation with a colleague about, “Why are sales people so product focused in their sales outreach?” We all know, at least I hope we do, that focusing on the customer, their issues/opportunities, and how we help them achieve their goals, is much more effective than pitching our products. Yet, why do so many organizations fail to do this? Why do we still see so many sales strategies dominated by, “It’s really about me, my product, and achieving my goals?” First, the reality, which people like me sometimes tend to gloss over too superficially, is that […]