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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
Our Job Is Helping The Customer, But All We Do Is Focus On Beating The Competition…..
I have to start this post with an acknowledgement and a concern about misinterpretation/misapplication of this article. With that as forewarning, let me dive into this. The majority of our sales engagement strategies involve us in only the very latest stages of our customers’ buying journeys. While we claim to want to help the customer solve their problems, we aren’t. By the time we engage the customer, the customer has determined how they will solve the problem. Our only involvement is influencing which vendor they are choosing to implement in that solution. As a result we win by beating the […]
AI, Salespeople, And The “Last Mile Problem”
AI offers tremendous promise to help sellers become much more efficient. A lot of the tasks that take seller time can be more effectively handled with AI tools. Properly used, with the right prompt engineering, AI can help us better understand potential issues our customers face. We can, for instance, ask it for issues facing certain roles. We can ask it to look at certain industries/markets, or types of companies. We can even provide financial reports and other data, that can be incorporated into the analysis and recommendations. We can invest a lot of time in refining our prompts, feeding […]
Finding The Time…..
Time management has always been an important concept. I can remember reading all sorts of books on effective time management, even back to college days. I continue to devour them, adapting many of the principles to my own time management. We have reached a “crisis” in time management. Every leader I speak with identifies the issue of “finding the time,” as one of the top issues they face. It’s not strategy, process, tools, talent, structure, execution or all the other things that consume leaders. It’s finding the time to do these things. Some of the time pressure we all face […]
Why Is Customer Acumen So Important?
Sometimes, I feel like a broken record talking about Customer and Business Acumen. Speaking to sales enablement executives, fewer than 10% have any sort of business acumen programs in place. When I talk to leaders about their GTM strategies, the focus is on products and presenting the capabilities of products. Yet these same leaders complain about the ability to connect to prospects and customers. It’s disappointing, but the majority of sellers I speak with can’t answer anything but the most basic questions about their customers and their businesses. I ask: We struggle to connect with our customers. Customers don’t want […]
The Seduction Of “React/Respond…..”
We live in worlds of constant interruption. Each morning, our inboxes and feeds are filled. Our attentions are drawn to those, we go through them, dealing with each one. Some one has asked a question, we have to respond with an answer. Someone has raised an issue, we have to address it. Something has happened in our social feeds, we have to jump into the conversation, if only to click a like. Our customers, partners, peers, managers ask us questions or make suggestions, we have to deal with each of them, immediately. Our phones and other devices vibrate, an alert […]
Letting Our Customers Ask Us The Wrong Questions!
It’s SKO season, yesterday I was leading a discussion with a great sales team. One of the sellers asked a question about dealing with customer questions and queries about the products, particularly deeply technical questions. As we spoke, it struck me how we revel in these questions. Customers asking us about the product capabilities, drilling deeply into what the products and solutions do. These are the discussions we strive to get since it is all about us and what we sell. But are they asking us the right questions? When we look at the data on No Decision Made and […]