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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
Whose Job Is It To Understand The Buyers?
George Bronten just published a fascinating post, “Your Sales Enablement Will Fail Without These 5 Things.” I agree with him on at least 3 of the 5, and kind of sorta, but not quite agree on the 2 remaining items. But his first critical success factor really struck me, Understand Your Buyers. I absolutely agree with this–but thought, is this sufficient? In some sense, sales is like the tail wagging the dog. We need to understand our buyers intimately, in order to engage them, and sell our solutions. But the issue of understanding the customer really has to go back […]
COUNTER Mentor Leadership–A Great Read
I’m inundated with requests to preview and review books. Unfortunately, there are just too many out there, many that are relatively unspectacular. As a result, I focus on a few, high quality books. Several months ago, Kelly Riggs asked me to take a look at Counter Mentor Leadership. I reviewed the early draft, written by Kelly and his son, Robby. Several things resonated with me! It’s a straightforward, no nonsense book. There aren’t any claims of magic, no “Easy” buttons, no miracle techniques. We’ve seen too many, “get rich quick” books on leadership that only succeed in getting the author […]
“I’m Not Trying To Sell You Anything……”
I don’t know why I picked up the phone, I knew better. It was one of those calls, you know what I’m talking about, the area code and the first three digits of the phone number exactly matched mine, but it was a number I didn’t know. I knew it was a sales person, leveraging local presence, trying to make me think he was in my neighborhood. Ironically, I was a continent away, it was the middle of the night. But for some reason, I was now awake, I knew what I was about to encounter, I answered the phone. […]
The Myth Of The “Single Decisionmaker”
How many people are involved in the customer buying decision? If you are a fan of CEBs research, the answer is 6.8. Other research says there is always a single dominant decision-maker. Still other research suggests there is a dominant influencer (or mobilizer), that drives the decision-making. Too often, when I talk to sales people, I get similar feedback, some will say it’s a group, but there is one dominant person in the group. Some will say, it is the most senior executive in whatever buying group they are involved with. 100% of the time, sales people will say, “I’m […]
Buying Process Or Selling Process Or Sales Methodology
Recently, I’ve seen a renewed interest or discussions on Buying Process, Selling Process, Sales Methodology. Part is driven by an old article of mine, Sales Process or Sales Methodology. There still seems to be a lot of confusion, some thinking we have to focus on one or the other. And then, unfortunately, there are too many, that while they might know the buying process or have a sales process or have a sales methodology–they simply don’t use them, instead choosing the Bumper Car approach to engaging the customer and selling. I thought I’d try to walk through these topics—at a […]
Leveraging Your Information Advantage
In the “good old days” of selling (if there ever were any), a lot of sales people reveled in their “information advantage.” Prospects and customers relied on sales people to educate them on products and solutions. Those days are long gone, customers are self educating on the web. They no longer have to rely on sales people for that information. Unfortunately, too many sales people are stuck in the past. If all they can do is pitch products/solutions, they have lost their information advantage. The customers are as knowledgeable (or more) than they. These sales people have lost the ability […]