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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
Letting Form Triumph Over Substance
One of my favorite authors/thinkers is John Gardner. About 35 years ago, a mentor introduced me to his work. One of his most profound books is entitled Excellence, Can We Be Equal An Excellent Too. I reread the book at least once a year. There is one phrase in the book that I’m obsessed with, “Do not let form triumph over substance.“ Too often, I see sales people, sales managers going through the motions. They are doing the things they think sales people or sales managers should be doing, without understanding the purpose, why they are doing these things, why […]
Stupid Works In Sales
I’ve been writing a number of pieces looking at the future of the sales profession. I’d be remiss not to include a discussion of stupidity in selling. Stupid works, and as long as stupid works, we will continue to see organizations invest in doing things stupidly. Stupid behavior exists everywhere, and selling is no more immune to stupidity than every other sector. People respond to stupid emails. After all, people purporting to be Nigerian Princes are making money. There will always be some people that will respond to scams. And enough respond that the people exploiting these tactics to make […]
Why I’m So Optimistic About The Future Of Selling
About 3-4 years ago, I was participating in a discussion, at the time hosted by CEB, now Gartner. It was a group of very bright thinkers/practitioners in sales and marketing. We were discussing the future of sales and marketing–things we saw happening, things we believed needed to change. It was a fascinating discussion, but I struggled participating in it. At the end, Brent Adamson pulled me to the side asking, “Dave, you seem to have a pretty dark outlook about selling, what’s up?” At the time, I had to agree with Brent’s assessment. But, I had no response, in fact […]
Sales, You Have To Do The Whole Job, All The Time!
We–or rather my wife–had an incident the other day. We have a housekeeper that comes into our house once a week. Recently, our housekeeper told my wife, “I really don’t like what I have to do here. You have too many bathrooms, I only want to clean one–or I’d love not to clean any. I don’t like dusting the high spots on your shelves or the high ceilings. And I can’t stand picking up all of Dave’s stuff! I’ve decided to focus on the things I really like–I like cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming. By the way, I would […]
The Sales Conversation Of The Future
AI/ML are, apparently, the future of selling. As I reflect on the brave new world of selling, I imagined a call of the future: Alexa: Hi, Siri, I’m Alexa from Super Cool As A Service Software Tools Company, otherwise known as SCAASSTC. Can I have 5 minutes of your time? Siri: Oh no, is this another robo call? We understand your algorithm, our algorithm shows we aren’t in your ICP, so you are wasting my time, but of course your algorithm should have known this. Alexa: Siri, I understand how your algorithm works, we’ve been evolving ours, we think we […]
Critical Skills For Sales Leaders
I’ve written a lot about the need for new skills for sales people, the traditional selling skills are in sufficient for success in the future. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest we stop training sales people in traditional selling skills, focusing on skills critical for the future. One might expect, the same applies for sales leaders/executives. After all, if the skills critical for sales success are changing so much, doesn’t that imply the same thing for sales leaders? Well, possibly–but mostly no…… The for sales leaders is different than the sales person’s job–it’s about leadership. The fundamentals of […]