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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 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle And Selling
Many of you know that I was actually trained as a Theoretical Physicist, but somehow found myself going to the Dark Side—Sales. But, I keep going back to my roots in physics, it sometimes helps me understand phenomena we encounter in Sales. One of the more well known areas of physics is the Uncertainty Principle, originated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927. Basically, it dealt with the quantum mechanics and the difficulty of simultaneously measuring speed and momentum of particles. We often confuse the Uncertainty Principle with the Observer Effect—which is really what I want to talk about, but thought you’d […]
Water, Water Everywhere, But Not A Bit To Drink…….
No this is not another plea for donations to my Charity:Water campaign (though if you want, click on the link). I saw a fascinating graphic and post at the Marketing Technologies Site. You should definitely read it. The headline, is they have identified 1876 Marketing Technology Vendors in 43 Categories. It’s up from 947 Vendors just a year ago! And I would guess that number is already inaccurate, because it’s 24 hours out of date! Furthermore, add to what is likely to be a similar number of Sales/CRM/Sales Enablement Tools, Customer Experience Management, other productivity tools (remember Word/Excel)….. We sales […]
Neutral Is Not A Strategy
Too often, I meet sales people who are uncomfortable with challenging their customers. Whether it’s out of politeness (the customer is always right), or not wanting to “rock the boat” with the customer, they are non-committal. They believe they are taking a safe middle path. Not challenging the customer. Not probing or questioning their needs. Not getting them to think about things differently. Not suggesting there may be a different way to look at things. Too often, they believe the best way to win the sale is to respond to what the customer is asking for or telling them, complying […]
Social Media Isn’t So Social
Whatever we call it: Social Media, Social Selling, Social Networking, Social Business; to often it’s just not very Social. There’s a huge race for companies and individuals to stake out their “turf” in the electronic wastelands and cloud networks. We are inundated with emails, texts, articles, newsletters, connection requests, horrendous prospecting attempts, mind numbing tweets all focused on one set of communications. The turf war is about building visibility, followers, likes, dislikes, endorsements and so forth. We race to build volume over quality, noise over thoughtful discussion. Too often, we leverage these social and new electronic platforms to talk about […]
Teamwork And Collaboration Is All BS!
My friend, Mike Weinberg, has gotten all in a lather about whether we hire Team Players Or Top Producers. His post is really good, I tend to agree with him, but have a slightly different perspective. We tend to casually toss around ideas of “good team players,” we need to “collaborate,” we need to “partner.” They are important concepts, but over time they’ve tended to be viewed as ends and not means. And I think that’s what Mike is railing against, and I’m in wild agreement. Teamwork, collaboration, partnering are all meaningless as outcomes. We don’t do these things to […]
How Will You Justify This To Your Management?
Too often, our customers focus on price, consequently we focus on price—after all we want to be responsive to our customers. But there are all sorts of problems our customers have when they focus on price. We tend to worry about it — after all, we want to minimize the amount of discounting we provide. But our customers face huge challenges by just focusing on price. The biggest is, when they have made a decision, they have to go to management for approval. The first question they will be challenged with is, “Why should we spend this money?” Ugh! Here […]