Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Coaching Our Customers
I recently wrote an updated version of “What Is Coaching?” In it, I focused on how leaders coach and develop their people. At the end of the article, I had and Afterword, suggesting the same principles used in high impact coaching within our own organizations should be applied in working with our customers. I want to do a deeper dive in this article. Rather than repeat all the things about what coaching is and isn’t, how we effectively coach, I’ll summarize three key areas here, but for the details go back to the What is Coaching article: When we look […]
What Is Coaching?
It seems the word “Coaching” has become one of those fashionable words, permeating every discussion. Go back 15 or more years, and we barely saw the word coaching. Today, we find coaching applying to about everything we do, both in business and in our personal lives. We see Executive Coaching, Career Coaching, Life Coaching, Performance Coaching, Business Coaching, Health/Wellness Coaching, Agile/Team Coaching, Sales Coaching, Spiritual Coaching, Dietary Coaching, and on an on and on. Endless “influencers” in social media claim to be providing coaching, where all they are really doing is broadcasting. There is the concept of coaching for virtually […]
Do You Know Your Customers’ Personal Objectives?
“Behind every business objective is the fulfillment of a personal objective.”* In our discovery process, if we conduct a discovery, we seek to understand the customers’ business objectives. “What problem are they solving, why is it important to solve it, what are the risks of solving/not solving it…….” And we focus the presentation of our solutions in terms of how it addresses the business objectives. Perhaps it’s a value proposition, an ROI, or something else. But underlying those business reasons, basically those things that impact their function and the work they do are personal objectives. It may be as simple […]
AI Isn’t The Selling Point!
Recently, I was coaching a seller on a critical call he was about to make. His strategy to engage the CRO was to lead with AI and the capabilities it enabled in the product he was selling. “Why are you leading with this,” I asked. “I’ve noticed in my research that he talks a lot about AI, I thought that would be a good way to engage him!” replied the seller. “I get it, his company sells software products, and they are making a big deal about AI, but is that the reason he should want to talk to you? […]
What Are We Trying To “Discover” In Our Discovery Process?
A long time friend and colleague asked me to sit in a vendor meeting. He is the CRO of a midsized company (About $1B). We’ve been working on developing new strategies to drive growth. The organization had been very successful, but he was looking to transform much of what they did to achieve higher levels of performance. One of the teams had been looking at leveraging some technology solutions to support the transformation. They were curious about leveraging some AI based tools as part of the transformation. More as part of their learning process, they arranged meetings with a few […]
Stop Waiting For The Customer!!
Most of our selling activities are driven by our customers. As much as we may try to pitch our solutions, they don’t care–until they care. We end up waiting for them to be ready to talk to us. Even then, too often, they are choosing to minimize or eliminate sellers, preferring rep free buying experiences. Ultimately, sellers are deterred in engaging customers until very late in the buying cycle, and when/if customers want that engagement. And while this represents the current reality sellers have learned to live with, perhaps even revel. And, somehow, organizations seem to meet their growth goals, […]