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
The “Chaotic” Buying Process
We know the importance of the marketing and sales process. It provides us a structured, disciplined approach to engaging our buyers. In theory, it should help us help the customer in navigating their buying process. Sounds good, what could be simpler–start at the beginning, go step by step through each stage, reach the end when the customer does, get an order, move on. The problem is, the customer buying process is not a structured, linear process. In fact, it could be described as chaotic. All of a sudden, something doesn’t make sense. We can start to see the disconnect between […]
In Remembrance–Robert Racine
Just 10 days ago, I was shattered hearing the news of Robert Racine’s passing. Robert was one of the most interesting and dedicated sales enablement professionals I have met. We first “met” a few years ago. He followed the blog and had made some thoughtful comments. Often, when I get particularly insightful comments, I start an offline conversation through email or phone. Robert and I started periodic email and phone conversations about critiquing the posts. His perspective was always fascinating, in each conversation I learned something. We didn’t agree in everything, but I think each of us learned and expanded […]
What Keeps Us From Doing What We Know Is Right?
Most Fridays, I take great joy in reading Hank Barnes #FridayFails. Hank features terrible prospecting emails, calls, LinkedIn messages and critiques them–always with a bit of humor. A lot of the emails inflicted on me are the subject of Hank’s columns. It always is fun to read them, chuckle, and ask oneself, “How could people be so clueless?” Hank’s posts happen to be a lot of fun, but we see hundreds of articles every day about poor sales and marketing execution. My own posts, often, focus on huge gaps in sales and marketing execution. In my experience, the majority of […]
Relationships Matter–But What Does That Mean?
Andy Paul wrote a terrific piece on relationships (visit TheSalesHouse to get some of his thinking). There is a lot of discussion, pro and con, about the importance of relationships–but little of it drives any clarity about what a relationship is, and why it matters. There are the “old timers,” who view relationships as key, but define relationships as friendship. Their approach is to exploit the “relationship,” but not the value they create in helping the customer achieve their goals. They cite the years of “relationship,” the lunches, golf games, birthday cards to kids, etc. They trade on this friendship, […]
Change–Never More Than Three!
We all know how difficult it is to change. Whether it’s our own personal habits/behaviors, those of our teams, our organization/company, or getting our customers to change. There endless pithy quotes both about the importance of change and the challenges of change. There are 1000’s or articles (add one more to the stack) about how to drive change. I’m not sure I have the magic solution to change. How to make it less painful (I’m not sure we really want to make it less painful)? How to make it easier, how to get people to accept it. Perhaps the only […]
Why Do People Buy?
I can already picture half the readers. Raising their eyebrows, perhaps rolling their eyes, thinking, “Well Dave, the answer is obvious……..” The obvious answer is to address needs, perhaps to solve a problem. Once that is acknowledged, the more sophisticated immediately leap to understanding the buyer’s journey. Too many focus only on the “seller’s journey.” hoping the buyer is interested in riding along. Inevitably our focus is on buying and selling, but we are still not aligned with the customer and their journey. Yet the customer is on a different journey. Of course they are addressing a need. That could […]