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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
Why I Am Obsessed With Selling!
I wrote a post, “Sellers, Are You Really Interested In Selling?” My friend, Christian Mauer, true to form, often poses some of the most challenging questions to my post. He did this asking, “Dave, why are you so interested in selling?” The answer is easy, but perhaps worth explaining. I’m obsessed with selling—all things selling. I’m driven to find and close deals. I’m driven to help clients address really tough problems. I’m fascinating to learn more about selling, different approaches, different tools, things others do to succeed. I’m excited by how selling is changing and the future of selling. I […]
Sellers, Are You Really Interested In Selling?
Without a doubt, selling is a really hard job. Regardless what role you hold in selling, it is very difficult. We get more “No’s” than “Yes’s.” We have to find ways of engaging people who do everything they can to resist those efforts. We have aggressive goals we must meet. We are often driven by high levels of activity. At the same time, there are endless details and minutia that we have to do as part of the jobs in selling. Finally, while we sell change, the rate at which we have to change to achieve our goals can be […]
The Growth Opportunities Are Stunning, Why Aren’t We Capturing Them?
My friend, Matt Heinz, posted a fascinating article which reminded me of some market analysis I’d forgotten. It’s from Gartner analysis, now about 3-4 years old, but still relevant. Summarized, at any point in time, as we look at B2B companies (To help us understand it, let’s imagine the total market size is 1000 companies): So with this as a baseline, let’s nerd out on some more data and math: Let’s pause and reflect on this for a moment. That’s a huge lost opportunity. These companies want to buy something but don’t. What if we focused on reducing no decision […]
Problem Or Product Focused Selling?
It’s Monday morning, I’ve just cleared my email and social feeds. Each of us experiences the same thing, grumbling at the terrible quality outreach. Then, too many of us turn around and inflict bad outbound prospecting on our own victims. 100% of the prospecting messages I see are product focused. The outbound communications are something like: Sometimes, the product pitches are thinly veiled by a problem: Every prospecting message I see focuses on the sender, their products, and their companies. Nothing focuses on our priorities and our company. But unless the prospect is very late in their buying process, product/solution […]
Making Things Tougher Than Need Be
Let’s play a thought experiment. Imagine you are the CRO, possibly the CEO of a company offering complex B2B solutions. Let’s imagine we had a game show, a group of CROs and we are giving them the choice to select what’s behind Door # 1 or Door # 2. Our host, Monty Hall, yells, “CROs come on down…..” Then Monty says, “Johnny, tell our contestants what’s behind Door #1 and Door #2!” Johnny comes on, in his deep voice says, “Thank you Monty! CROs which will you choose….?” After presenting what’s behind Door #1 and Door #2, Johnny goes on: […]
“You Started This Conversation, Why Can’t You Hold Up Your End Of It….?”
It was a provocative outreach. The seller identified an issue he thought was impacting our company. He opened with, “We see this challenge…… impacting organizations like yours. We think you can be doing better……” Intrigued, it was an important issue (it always is for small businesses), I responded, “What causes you to say we face that issue and can do better?” Quickly, he responded, “I’d like to schedule a meeting where we can demo our solutions….” I stopped him, “No you raise a fascinating issue and seem to think we can do better. I’d love to learn more about what […]