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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
Urgency Alignment
Recently, I was having a conversation with a group of sellers about ICPs and qualification. During the conversation, we were trying to refine their targeting and qualification. They were relatively sophisticated, but something wasn’t quite working as effectively as they hoped. I introduced the idea of “Urgency Alignment.” I asked, are you and the customer aligned in the sense of urgency to achieve a shared goal? The ensuing discussion was fascinating. The sellers had a high sense of urgency to close the deal–and to do it “this quarter.” We talked about how that was irrelevant to the customer. They are […]
“I’m Wasting My Time Being ‘Problem Focused!'”
Sometimes, I sound like a broken record (Hmmm, I need to update that metaphor). Selling isn’t about pitching solutions. It’s about helping customers understand and solve their problem. It’s about helping the customer develop and maintain change urgency. This shift drives higher levels of customer engagement, builds greater trust, and higher win rates. It reduces buying/sales cycles by 30-40%. But when I talk about this, I often get pushback from sellers. It usually boils down to this, “I can’t afford to take the time to help customers understand and define their problems. What if I do all that work, and […]
The Deck Was Never The Point!
I was struck by a LinkedIn post with the opening line: “Microsoft just made QBR prep obsolete. And CSMs everywhere should be celebrating.” The rest of the article talked about how Microsoft has integrated AI into it’s products, eliminating all the work needed to prepare the charts for a QBR. And there is post after post, outlining the same principles. We no longer have to do pre-call research and prep, there are AI tools that do all of it for us, presenting us the call plan a few minutes before we make the call. Or after the call, we no […]
How You Sell To Me Shows How You Will Sell For Me…
As I clean out my inbox, texts, social messages, I often ask myself the question, “Do they actually ever read what they are sending me? Do they care about how they are representing themselves? Are they establishing the impression they want?” Your inboxes probably look the same as mine. You are inundated with people who have perfected outreach and engagement. Endless offers of, “we can find more leads, we can build your LinkedIn presence, we can bring you more opportunities, we can be your outsourced prospecting……” You probably have them memorized. To them personalization is a name, the company name—and […]
The Secret To Your Competitive Advantage……
A colleague shared an observation from a CRO. The CRO had discovered the secret to his team’s competitive advantage. Drum roll…….. The secret to your competitive advantage has nothing to do with your products, your pricing, even your company and it’s reputation. The secret to your competitive advantage is “Mediocrity!” Not yours, but your competitors! We live in a world of increasing sameness, at least in selling and our GTM strategies. Everyone does the same things in the same way. We use the same playbooks. We have the same sequences, leveraging the same tools. We measure the same KPIs. We […]
Fetishizing “AI Native”
In certain circles there seems to be a lot of preening around the concept of “AI Native.” When I start asking what that means, it’s difficult to get a definition. For some, it’s start-up companies bringing products to the market that are wholly AI based. And like many startup, there is a lot of bragging about double/triple digit growth, enormous market caps. (Hmmm, I’ve seen this movie before….) Some of these things focus on everything being done within the AI itself, but with a few exceptions, like art and video, these systems depend on outside data and information to do […]