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
Our Models Limit Us, Dangerously
We build all sorts of models to help us understand our customers, markets, competition. We look at changes, disruptions, building them into our models. They help us simplify and focus our efforts and initiatives. They provide a framework each of us understands, enabling our teams to maximize performance. Eventually, they provide the operating framework guiding our strategies and execution. Models are very powerful and critical to our success. At the same time, our models limit us and our thinking. Often dangerously. We tend to view everything in the world in the context of our models. And when they don’t fit, […]
The Quiet Power Of Knowing Who You Are
The first Saturday every month, Ned, Jack, Tom and I jump on a Zoom call. They are roughly 60 minutes, generally run a few minutes longer. No agenda, we tend to wander around 3-5 topics. We started congratulating Jack on his new grandchild. We moved on to congratulate Tom on appearing on the Chris Voss podcast. It was a fascinating, deft tug of war. Tom was invited to talking about the Stoics and Stoicism. Somehow, Chris kept tugging stoicism into the manosphere, associating being Stoic with toughness, confidence, chest beating. Gently, Tom wouldn’t acknowledge that, but would find a thread […]
“14% Of Our Sellers Drive 80% Of Revenue!”
“14% of sellers drive 80% of revenue!” This, and similar data points, are showing up in my feeds, with various experts commenting on what it means, then offering insights and solutions to address. While I have a lot of questions about this data and would like to get under the numbers to better understand, I’m always amused by the insights and recommendations provided by the experts. It seems this data point has become an inviolable law of nature. It’s there with other “laws of nature,” things like: The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west, what […]
If What We Sell Is Change, Why Is It So Difficult For Us?
The job of every seller is simple. It’s all about change! It can be as simple as, “My product/solution is better than the one you currently are using, buy mine!” Or what too many do, “My product is cheaper than the product you are currently using, buy mine!” When we are more sophisticated, “We can solve your problem, buy my product!” And when we are really working deeply and collaboratively with our customers, we focus on co-creation, imagining new possibilities and transformation. And these are all about having our customers make a change and helping them in that process. With […]
Embracing The “Messiness” Of Buying And Selling
As human beings and business professionals we crave structure and order in everything we do. We build carefully architected sales processes. Our customers draft detailed project plans, guiding them on their journey. Our models/frameworks, whether buying or selling, are clean, linear, structured, logical and rational. And we develop metrics aligned with these models. We think systems and processes. We diagram, flowchart, checklist and script. We apply labels like Bow-Tie, SPICED, MEDDPICC, Jobs To Be Done. We package it into neat little boxes, each with it’s own set of metrics, all striving to be perfectly predictable. And nothing goes to plan. […]
Stop Selling Solutions, Start Framing Problems
We have an enormous disconnect with our customers. We focus on selling a solution. Our customers struggle with understanding the problem. We’ve tended to take an approach of “Find a problem, Solve it!” We narrow our ICPs to customers that are likely to have the problems we solve. We look for signals those customers might have the problem we solve. Perhaps they are hitting on the website, perhaps they downloaded a white paper or case study. We immediately leap in, “We have a solution to your problem, can I schedule a demo?” Alternatively, we are on a discovery call, asking […]