Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
The “CEO Card……”
I’ve been reading a number of articles about how win rates skyrocket when you get a very senior exec or founder involved in a sales opportunity. Sometimes opening a deal, sometimes in the final stages of a deal. These experts expound on how to get these exalted people involved in deals to drive executives involved in opening and closing deals for reps, all quoting increases in win rates (one cited a 408% increase which makes me wonder how bad the team really was!) And I get it. Executives just because of their titles can get much higher levels of engagement […]
Information Asymmetry…..
Information Asymmetry has been a powerful tool in buying/selling almost from when Eve convinced Adam to take a bite of an apple. Centuries ago, Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.” We’ve always tended to wield that knowledge as a weapon, creating advantage to us. Information asymmetry occurs where one party has a disproportionate informational or material knowledge advantage over the other party. When I first started selling, simply giving my customer data sheets/specs, case studies, brochures about products drove my ability to engage them in conversations about their business. The customer needed in formation about potential solutions, and the easiest […]
Are You Interested In Your Customers?
Pop Quiz! Clear your screens/devices, put down your pencils. This is a thought experiment. Now, here’s the question: I want to talk to you! I want to arrange a Zoom meeting to talk about what we do as a business. I want to talk about our offerings, our happy customers, and how great we are as a company? Can we arrange a 30 minute conversation to talk about these things? Raise your hands in the comments, give me your contact info and I will arrange a conversation to tell you about our offerings. Of course, I’ll do some nominal research, […]
Control Disguised As Coaching
Often, when I talk to managers, they tell me how much time they spend coaching. They tell me stories of meeting, weekly, with their people, doing reviews, pipeline discussions, activity discussions—-all sorts of “coaching meetings.” They say, “Dave, coaching is important and we are spending a lot of time coaching…..” I often ask, “How’s it working?” There are sighs and grimaces, “They aren’t paying attention, the aren’t doing what I tell them to do, they don’t seem to care……” The feeling is they are doing the coaching, the problem is with the people. Usually, following these discussions, I sit in […]
Do Your People Look Forward To Meeting With You?
If you are a manager, sit down, swallow hard, ask yourself this question: “Do your people actually look forward to meeting with you?” Perhaps ask yourself, “Do you look forward to meeting with your manager?” Alternatively, “Do they look forward to taking you on a customer call?” If you and your people are like 70% of the sellers I meet, the answer to this question is usually an eyeroll. Sometimes, I get a frustrated, “Well, it’s part of my job…..” or “It’s frustrating, they are always telling me what I’m doing wrong or that I need to do more…” or, […]
Helping Your Customer Imagine New Possibilities
We are each consumed with problems. Problems we encounter in our jobs, problems our organizations have, problems in our industries and markets, problems in…… It’s overwhelming and exhausting. We can’t possibly address all of them, and too often, when we do, new challenges pop up. Too often, we push the problems to the side, just ignoring them, accepting the consequences. Too often, when we look at change and addressing a problem, we worry if we are doing the right thing, we are consumed with FOMU (Fear of Messing Up). And, the majority of change initiatives are abandoned because of this. […]