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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
We Have To Have The Courage To Let Our People Do Their Jobs!
Too often, as managers, we get in the way of our people doing their jobs–either purposefully/intrusively, accidentally, being well-intentioned, or through inattention. Whichever way this manifests itself, it stands in the way of us doing our jobs–that is to maximize the performance of each person on our team. Failing to do this, means we don’t achieve our goals in the short or long term. We can’t do our people’s jobs–the numbers go against us. We do them, our companies, a disservice if we don’t enable them, hold them accountable, and let them do their jobs. But too often we don’t […]
Controlling Your Destiny
For those who may not have already guessed, I’m a control freak. It can be a terrible characteristic if it is manifested in micro-management, constantly being in tell mode, not listening. Over years, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what I can control–and makes sense to control, and letting go. As much as we like to think we can control things, there is so much beyond our control. We can’t control our customers or their buying process. We can only seek to guide it, influence it, help our customers navigate the buying process, but they have to control […]
The Questions Sales People Ask?
Questioning is critical for sales people. Every sales training program focuses on the importance of questioning. We ask questions to qualify. We ask questions to understand need. We ask questions to learn requirements. We ask questions to understand alternatives the customer is considering. We ask questions about the decision making process. We ask questions to assess customer understanding/knowledge of our products. We ask questions to understand their perception of our proposed solution. We even have questions we ask to close. To help sales people, we develop endless playbooks, battlecards, and scripts with questions they have to ask. But too often, […]
On Differentiation
Differentiation is critical in helping customers select our solution over the alternatives. As important as it is, most sales people do a terrible job at differentiation. Ultimately, too many are unable to differentiate in meaningful ways, as a result they end up differentiating on price. Every time we win by taking pricing actions, we are telegraphing and reinforcing, “There is really no reason to buy our products/services other than we are the cheapest alternative available.” Over time, these actions train both our customers and sales people that we are no better and no worse than any other alternative–and that we […]
Technology Only Gets Us So Far
I’m a great fan of much of many sales technologies. There are tools that dramatically improve efficiency. These allow us to get more accomplished, more easily and in less time. There are tools that give us greater insight into the customer–both the enterprise and individual. We can leverage customer searches of our sites, the materials they have downloaded, and communications they may have had to give us better insight into their interests. AI and related tools deepen those insights and help us better determine the timing of when a customer might be interested in a conversation. These tools can even […]
Hearing What We Don’t Want To Hear Is Critical
It seems, as human beings, we are increasingly less open to hearing differing points of view. We immediately reject those that have a different opinion or world view, not taking the time to understand it, learn/evaluate, perhaps challenge it, or perhaps even shifting our own opinions as we learn more. We seek those that share our points of view, continually reinforcing what we want to hear, exposing ourselves less and less to other thinking. We isolate ourselves to tribal thinking, discounting anything that is outside of the tribal view. Technology is here to help us, it watches our browsing habits, […]