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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
Selling Fearlessly
There are hundreds of new books on selling published every year. To be honest, not many of them offer a lot new. The better ones have some slightly new takes on very old ideas–but they provide some refreshing insights, approaches, or make you think about things a little differently. The majority, well, my Mom always said, “If you can’t say something nice…….” The problem with all these books is they tend to approach things from the ideal. “Do this exactly as I say, and it will always work.” The reality is things are seldom the ideal. Sometimes, you do everything right and […]
Is Your Sales Strategy Based On Assumptions?
The scene gets played over and over, literally hundreds of times every year. I’m sitting with a sales person or team, we’re reviewing a deal, building a strategy to win it. I’ll ask a question, it could be about the problem the customer is trying to solve, their needs and priorities, the decision-making process, the competition, how differentiated the value proposition is. It could be anything. The sale person responds. Say we’ve been talking about the decision making process and I ask who the decision maker is, the sale person says, “Erin is the key decision maker.” I follow-up, asking, […]
“Intelligent Leads”
I was recently asked to share my views of the impact of Big Data, business intelligence, and data analytics in sales. We are only beginning to scratch the surface in leveraging Big Data, particularly in sales. Many other functions have been leveraging big data and rich analytics for years, with great impact. I’ve been quoted a lot about my view that Big Data and rich analytics are the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” for sales and marketing. These have the greatest potential in driving both sales effectiveness, but also customer experience of anything that I’m seeing. […]
Messaging Or Engaging, Where Is The Conversation?
I may be guilty of wordsmithing and I’d appreciate you correcting me on this, however I’m becoming very uncomfortable with all the posts and emphasis I see on messaging. Maybe part of what’s driving this post, is I’m getting sick and tired of being “messaged.” As Voting Day approaches, the intensity of messaging is increasing, but my engagement is plummeting. I wonder of this is a problem we have with our prospects and customers. Are we messaging, but not engaging. Are we messaging, but not generating conversations? Don’t get me wrong, messaging is very important, but it is a means not the objective, or […]
What’s Next? How Do We Win?
It seems I spend half my life in reviews–territory reviews, pipeline reviews, deal reviews. Most of the reviews leave me with a slightly uncomfortable feeling. The discussions focus mostly on what’s happened. Most of the time is spent in talking about history, when it seems the bulk of the discussion should be about “what do we do about it, what’s next?” There are several objectives to reviews. The first is to get a snapshot or status updated of the “state of the business,” whether it’s a deal, territory, pipeline, account–whatever. The second is a collaborative effort focused on “what do we need […]
But We Gave Them Everything They Wanted!?!
It was a loss review, one of those very difficult discussions after a major–and surprising loss. I’d been invited by a client to participate and help analyze the loss. First, I have to congratulate them for conducting a review, too few organizations conduct these and use these for improvement. But that’s not the point. During the review, one of the product management executives was really puzzled as the sales team explained the loss. At one point, exasperated, he said, “But we gave them everything they wanted……why did we lose?” He was frustrated and didn’t understand. They had met all the […]