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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
Insight, Triggers, And Connecting The Dots
Top performing executives, business development, and sales professionals have an incredible, almost innate ability to “connect the dots.” It’s really what sets them apart from everyone else. This ability to connect the dots is the ability to instantly assess: This is what’s happening in this person’s markets/industry. This is what’s happening in their company. This is what’s happening to them as individuals. These are events that are occurring right now–that impact them directly or indirectly. Here are the problems/challenges they face. This is what I can do to help them do something about it. This is why they should do […]
When Will We Stop Talking About The Technology?
It seems virtually every discussion I get into about advances in sales, marketing, or business eventually gets to technology. I guess it’s sexy and cool to talk about neat technologies and other things we leverage. It’s cool to show mobile devices, display screens, wearables, and other sorts of things. They are things we can embrace and start to use, then subsequently blame, when they don’t produce results. Or we can move technology to technology, always claiming, “just wait, this one is it.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m really a geek/nerd. I’m an early adopter of virtually every new technologies. I have closets filled […]
Confusing Wants And Needs
Too often, both we sales people and our customers confuse wants and needs. They are similar but very different. The outcomes we get from selling to what our customers want, versus what they need are profoundly different. As sales people, we’re taught to understand customer needs–in reality, what happens is we focus on customer wants. When we sell to a customer’s wants, we are primarily focused on a “future state.” We and the customer talk about new things they would like to do, how they want to change their operations, new capabilities they would like to have. We can develop […]
How About Trying What Works?
I have to confess to being a little lazy. Let me explain, I work very hard, I put in long hours, but still I’m lazy. The reason I think I’m lazy is I want to accomplish all the things I do in as simple or easy way as possible. As a result, I read a lot, I talk to a lot of people, I attend workshops, I watch how other people get things done. Then I take things I see those people doing–the things that seem to be working for them, and I shamelessly copy, emulate, steal, and adapt these […]
Working Hard
I meet thousands of sales people a year. Most of them really care about the job they are doing. Most of them work very hard–they put in long hours, they are constantly busy. But too often, they miss their goals. It’s not through lack of effort, but much of it is they don’t approach the hard work of sales in the proper way. This may be worded strangely, but too often, I see sales people working hard to achieve their goal, but they don’t have a plan to achieve their goal. Here’s an example. This week I’m working with a […]
How Do They Buy?
I write constantly about the buying process, understanding how customers buy, how we align our sales process with the customer’s buying process, and how we create value through the whole thing. However, I realized I’ve overlooked something. It seems so obvious, but I’ve been surprised to see how few sales people understand this–at least early in the sales process. What I’m talking about is, “How do customers buy?” I mean, once they’ve made the decision for you, once you’ve settled on the price (or at least hopefully). What do they have to go through just to issue a purchase order […]