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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
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Chris Palmissano
Preface: Chris Palmissano and I “met” a number of years ago. We started sharing ideas about sales performance, particulalry in some of his early leadership and entrepreneurial roles. We continue those conversations to today. A line that stood out, “If you accept sales is about moving people, then it becomes easy to stay positive about selling. You start to see sales everywhere.” Why am I interested in selling? Selling is about moving people. I heard a story on a podcast about how an insurance salesperson wasn’t able to convince a pair of young parents they needed or could benefit from […]
“Should We Do Things Differently?”
The key opportunity we sellers face is our customers posing a question to themselves, “Should we do things differently?” This is the critical question that initiates a change process, creating opportunities that we can pursue. Sometimes, there are things that provoke the customer to pose that question of themselves. Performance problems, missed goals, competitive challenges, new opportunities. The customer recognizes these, asking themselves, “Should we do things differently?” Sometimes, customers may be oblivious to this. They are so busy doing their day jobs they don’t take time to look around. Often, the incitement to change comes from an external source, […]
Surviving Tough Times…..
Slowdowns are impacting many sectors of the economy. We see a lot of uncertainty. Massive layoffs are still happening. Businesses, industries and markets are being restructured, profoundly. Overlay this with disruptions being caused by technologies like AI, global climate changes, and the global political challenges. We struggle with the idea, is there light at the end of the tunnel? How do we survive (though some real leaders are asking themselves how we thrive.) And too many have never seen this, they have no experience with which to deal with this. Many of my clients are asking for help in figuring […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” John Callies
Preface: I met John Callies in our very first sales training class for IBM. We were at Endicott, New York, where most of entry sales training was conducted. Through our first year, every few months we’d see each other in Endicott at another class. We lost track of each other–John ended up going to senior executive levels in IBM, eventually was the General Manager of IBM Global Finance. We stumbled on each other about 10 years ago, at Dreamforce. We renewed our relationship, discussing things we had seen happen over our very different careers, periodically catching up an exchanging ideas. […]
You Are Your Company’s “Value Proposition”
We still have very antiquated views of our “value proposition.” Most of the time, we restrict it to the value that might be realized through the purchase and implementation of our solutions. Ideally, we will have developed a business case for our solutions, perhaps looking at cost reduction, ROI or some other financial return the customer should expect from our solution. Sometimes, we look at an extended view–not just the results from the implementation of our solutions, but the extended impact of our solutions as part of a larger change initiative. And our competitors are doing the same thing. And […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” John Nardella
Preface: When I met John Nardella years ago, he was an eager but relatively new AE for a company selling DevOps tools. Within a couple of years, he grew to be the top performer, globally. Today, he is responsible for some of SAPs largest enterprise accounts. John is viciously focused–he deeply understands the customer and their drivers. He will always do the right thing for the customer. At the same time, he considers his quota as something he passes on the way to achieving his personal goals. Like others who’ve offered their stories, John has a clear purpose: “Each sale […]