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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
AI And Buyer Confidence
All credit for this post goes to Scott Gillum and his fantastic post: Why Relying on AI Won’t Improve Customer Experience. Reading it caused me to start reflecting on how much we misunderstand about AI and how we leverage it in selling. Without a doubt, AI will have a huge impact on both how we manage/lead our organizations and on how we effectively and efficiently engage our customers in their buying process. Having said that, I worry that we miss the most important parts of those experiences and misunderstand AI’s ability to address those. We don’t yet understand AI and […]
It’s The Little Things That Count…..
It’s human nature to focus on the big things. Whether it’s a BHAG, a closing presentation for a major deal, a big job opportunity, a critical event. We obsess about how we succeed. We develop strategies, contingency plans, prep and rehearse. We are driven to succeed for those big things. We treat the little things differently. We may skip them, thinking they aren’t important. We may not prepare well, winging it. We may not even recognize what they are. Things like showing up on time, being prepared, the thank you note. Even if it’s something no one else sees, there […]
Leads, Top Of Funnel, Do We Really Understand?
Focus on the top of the funnel and everything else will work out. This seems to dominate so much of the conversation I see. It’s not wrong, but it’s not completely right. But this thinking drives our focus on MQLs, SQLs and massive prospecting efforts. We seem to overlook the questions, “How do we know what ‘Top of Funnel’ we need? How do we shift that in our favor?” We cannot focus exclusively on Top of Funnel. What drives our Top of Funnel requirements is what happens in the funnel itself. What’s our win rate, what’s our average deal size, […]
Pissing Contests…..
Yeah, some of you will be offended by the crude title of this post. I just couldn’t think of a better description of something that dominates too many selling conversations. It’s the pricing/cost discussion. Whether it’s the initial purchase, or the renewal/extension, we and our customers waste too much time in pissing contests about price. We present our price, the customer’s moral obligation is to object to the price. Part of this is legit, part is positioning, a lot is that we’ve trained them to object because they know we will always capitulate and give a discount. And we go […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Jim Wood
Preface: Jim Wood and I met at a Gartner Conference. We were listening to Brent Adamson. Brent was provoking audience engagement, so he said, “Turn to the person next to you and ask, ………” Jim and I hadn’t met, we looked at each other, I said, “This is BS!” Jim started laughing in agreement. We spent the audience participation time getting to know each other. (Sorry Brent, we didn’t do what you asked, but we had a great time talking to each other). In one of his last statements, Jim paints an interesting picture, “One of the reasons I’m so […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Jim Berryhill
Preface: My first real experience of Jim Berryhill was in 2012. We were sitting in his lake house (North of Atlanta), with his business partner, John Porter and his son, Jake. It was in the very early days of Decisionlink, we were solving the problems of business value selling. They were just launching the company, I was advising them on the launch strategy. Unbeknownst to us, Jim and I had probably encountered each other years before. We were leaders driving competitive sales organizations. While we didn’t know each other, I had great respect for those organizations. Jim and John, were […]