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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
“Time To Customer Acumen…..”
Preface: This is long and very nerdy. But I think it’s important to share the details of this fascinating research project. We struggle with the idea of, “How do we develop better business acumen with our sellers? How much time, how much investment, when will we see the results? What this project shows is “Time to customer acumen is amazingly short–and simple!” Enjoy! Yeah, you know I’m a broken record on customer, problem, business, and financial acumen. I bore you with ideas and data showing how developing and implementing these skills is critical in driving our customer relationships and trust. […]
“Solve For” Vs. “Solve With,” The Real Role Of A Seller
Theoretically, we have solutions to our customers’ problems. Unfortunately, we tend not to focus on these, we tend to pitch the solutions, without knowing if the customer has the problem we solve, or really understanding that problem and what it means to them. We train our people to “solve the problem.” In their best engagements, we show up with insights, demonstrating, “here’s the solution to your problem, and if you buy by the end of the quarter we will offer you a discount….” The thinking underlying this approach is “We solve the problem for our customers!” The reality of the […]
Adapting To Today’s Realities, A Ruthless Pragmatist’s Guide
For the past several weeks, I’ve been writing some fairly esoteric/philosophical things. Talking about entanglement, durable revenue, rethinking value, and that value is in the friction. But most of you know me as a “ruthless pragmatist.” You are probably confused–and you should be. So I’m embarking on a series of articles, moving from philosophy to practice, theory to execution. My hope is to help you think about how you can take these abstract concepts and actually put them into practice. Let’s start with our GTM strategies. First, we need to stop pretending our GTM strategies are working they way they […]
Would Your Customers Notice?
All our customers are critical to our success. We strive to retain, renew, grow, and expand those we currently have. Every deal in our pipeline is important to us and our ability to achieve our goals. But what would happen if we were to disappear? In our current customers, what would happen if we disappeared? Would they just find a substitute product and move on with no impact? In our pipelines, what if we were to suddenly start ghosting our customers. We were in consideration, but just disappeared. Would they notice? Would they care? Or would the roll on, perhaps […]
The Value IS The FRICTION!
We are obsessed with eliminating the friction! We want to create frictionless experiences. We fetishize efficiency. We leverage technology to do the work. We strive for easy. But what if we were to shift our point of view? What if we recognized that friction isn’t our enemy, but it’s our source of value? Permit me, for a moment, to revert back to my training as a physicist. I learned that friction underlies everything that occurs. Without friction, we get no traction, we cannot move. It’s like the tire on ice that is spinning, but doesn’t move because of insufficient friction. […]
Mechanics Over Meaning
For over a decade, too much of the focus in selling has been on the mechanics of the buyer-seller interaction. All efforts have been focused on the mechanics of the tasks sellers do, and to a much lesser degree, the mechanics of tasks buyers do. Tools and technology, focused on efficiency has enabled sellers to execute far more tasks than in the past. Sellers now send thousands of emails, make 100s of dials, efficiently scroll through social feeds with likes and the occasional “DM me.” And something has been lost in those efforts—-but you already know that, so I won’t […]