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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
Productive Conflict
Over the past week, I’ve been involved in several conversations that have the same underlying theme. It’s basically around the concept of Productive Conflict. I believe this is a critical concept–both in how we engage our customers and in driving change internally. At the same time, I believe it is misunderstood, avoided, and executed very poorly with horrible results. As sales people and/or as business leaders, we are responsible for driving change. Whether it is with/for our customers our within our organizations. Change always creates conflicts, though we may not recognize them as such. Why change, change to what, change […]
The Sales Jigsaw Puzzle
Every once in a while, I like to do a jigsaw puzzle. It’s nice to do in the evening, no distraction from devices, there’s the great tactile feeling as I pick up a new piece, trying to figure out where it fits. Then there’s the great reward at the end, once all the pieces are in place, you finally see the whole picture and it makes sense. Sometimes, I think selling, and all the things sales people must do to be successful, is something like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s often confusing and difficult to understand each of the pieces/parts until […]
What Is The Purpose Of Buying?
I can imagine the raised eyebrows, the questioning expressions, and the thought, “What the hell is he talking about now? What kind of esoteric journey is he dragging us on?” Some might glibly say, “Well to solve a problem….” Which is correct, kind of…. But most sales people seldom think about the purpose of buying. A customer wants to buy, sales people immediately leap to selling, knowing the purpose of selling is to get an order.* At best, we focus on helping the customer buy, but seldom pause to think about the purpose of buying. Buying doesn’t exist in a […]
You Don’t Fix Pipeline Problems In The Pipeline!
One of the biggest mistakes sales managers and sales people make is spending too much time focusing on the health of the pipeline. Managers are constantly holding pipeline reviews. They are constantly asking, “What’s changed since we reviewed the pipeline yesterday?” (You can see how tedious these constant reviews are, particularly if you have a long sales cycle (anything over 3 months).) Inevitably, there are problems with the pipeline. There’s the universal managerial answer to these issues, “You need to get more in the pipeline!” “Well yeah, but…….” Turns out the advice to get more into the pipeline isn’t really […]
Scaling “Authentic Conversations”
I just received one of those emails. I’m on a distribution list, I’ve been invited to hear a webinar on “How do you scale authentic communications.” Among the topics they will be covering are: “how to automate meaningful and timely follow up,” and “how much time is too much time spent on personalizing emails………” (Interestingly, the only personalization in this email was my name. Nothing else was specific to our company or our priorities) Huuughhhh………????? Authenticity at scale?????? In fairness, I’m not going to sign up for this webinar, so I have no idea what this vendor will present. Perhaps […]
Just Because Buying Is “Chaotic,” Doesn’t Mean It’s What Customers Want!
As we increasingly understand the “Chaotic Buying Journey,” as illustrated by the great work done by my friends at Gartner; marketing and sales people are struggling with, “How do we respond?” Too often, the thinking is, “We have to meet the customer where they are at!” Some marketing and sales enablement people are reveling in the new content challenge, thinking, they have to provide content and related support for every one of these points in the buyer journey. The thinking is, “We must mirror the buyer journey.” The underlying principle of aligning with the buyer’s journey and intercepting them where […]