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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
Account Strategies, How Important Are We To The Customer?
Account Based Everything has been the rage of the past couple of years. The principles of ABE are outstanding–focused on further tailoring and personalization of our marketing and sales approaches to the specific needs and priorities of the customer–both the enterprise and individual (actually these are great principles for any customer outreach). Inevitably, we start putting these accounts into our account programs: Major Accounts, Key Accounts, Strategic Accounts, Corporate Accounts, Global Strategic Accounts, Super Duper Really Humongous Very Special Accounts (OK, I invented that one). We do these things because the customer is important to us. We want to retain […]
Top Sales Enablement Priorities
Rightfully, sales enablement gets a lot of attention these days. Dozens of articles and studies talk about the importance of sales enablement in developing the capabilities of sales people. Organizations like the Sales Enablement Society is bringing the discussion and frameworks for sales enablement to the front and center of our collective attentions. The priorities cover a lot of areas: On boarding Learning and development Talent management Content Systems, tools, processes ….and more With the exception of articles by a small number of people including Mike Kunkle and Tamara Schenk, there is one critical area that’s notably absent. What about […]
We Are The Very Best Company To Do These Things ……..
Quickly, go to your email and look at the last 10 unsolicited prospecting emails you’ve received, I’ll wait until you come back……. Back already? Let me guess, every single one of those emails started with something similar to: “We are a world leading provider of …….” “We are the best supplier of….” “Our products/services are use by these great companies….” “People interested in these issues [fill in whatever you choose] are always interested in learning about our solutions…” “Our products will enable you to [insert whatever you want, including world peace, world hunger, and losing weight]” Alternatively, it may be […]
I’m Ashamed Of Our Government
Forgive me for diverting from my normal commentary on business, leadership, sales, marketing, and customer experience. I hardly feel qualified to speak about politics. Yet, I’m a proud American Citizen, and feel I can no longer remain silent. I’m ashamed of our government. It’s a horrible thing for anyone to express about their government–particularly when they are elected officials. But I’m sick and tired of the pettiness, bullying, taunting, selfish, and childish behaviors we see in our government. It’s not just the Executive Office, but also, of our senators, congress people, and many of the bureaucrats in all parts of […]
“Sell What You Use, Use What You Sell!”
I have to admit, this post is targeted primarily to vendors of Sales/Marketing tools, services, and consulting. I guess being a consultant in this space makes me a target for more than my fair share of poorly thought out marketing and sales approaches. Frankly, I think any person with sales, marketing, business development in their job title gets inundated with the same crap I have to wade through daily. To make my point, I have to step back to the 80’s At the time, I was an executive in the Manufacturing Industry segment of IBM. We had responsibility to sell […]
The Customer Buying Process Is Not About You Or Your Competition!
I’m tempted to paraphrase the old Carly Simon song, You’re So Vain. Too often we think our customers’ buying cycles are about us, at least a choice between us and our competitors. We may be very customer focused in our sales process, trying to understand and align ourselves with the customer buying process. But still, our strategies tend to focus on a singular part of the customer buying cycle, “What does it take to select us?” As a consequence, everything we do, probably everything our competitors do is singularly focused on that one decision. But looking at it from a […]