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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
Changing The Questions
We know questions are critical to our success as sales people. Sadly, we ask too few, choosing instead to pitch our products and solutions, hoping the customer has some interest in considering them, though we often don’t know why. Most modern selling programs talk about the importance of questions, but too often they focus on the wrong questions: Do you have funding for this project?Who’s involved in the decision making process? How will it be made?What alternatives are you considering?When will you make a decision?What are your needs and requirements? We can go on endlessly, whether they are BANT or […]
Start With The End In Mind, The Tyranny Of More, Part 2
I wrote, “Tilting The Numbers In Our Favor, The Tyranny Of More.” In that, I suggested we might actually be more effective if we started thinking about how we accomplish our goals by doing less. The basic premise is that to do less and still achieve our goals, we have to do much better. We have to increase our win rates, increase our average deal size, compress our sales cycles, improve our prospecting, improve how we engage our customers, create great value in every interaction. I’d like to extend that discussion. While I think focusing on “getting better,” has a […]
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 […]