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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
What If…..
I started my career selling mainframe computers for IBM. When I joined IBM, they were just coming off several years of an advertising campaign that presented a rather stark proposition, “What If…” That was it, nothing else. For some reason that campaign had fallen out of favor with all the marketing and advertising types and was displaced by something that was frankly not memorable. But from a sales point of view, the campaign was inspirational–it still is. Today, so many of the great customer conversations begin with “What if….” or “Have you ever thought of…” or “Have you considered…..” Engaging […]
Stacking The Deck!
I’ve got a terrible confession to make. I cheat. I don’t want to play fair and square. I don’t like to play on a level playing field. I do everything I can to tilt deals to my favor. I do everything I can to stack the deck. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our inclination as sales people is to do this. We want our customers to prioritize the things that we do well and that our competitors do poorly. Likewise, we want our customer to de-prioritize the things our competitors do well and we do poorly. We do everything we […]
Average Is Over
I read a fascinating Op Ed piece by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, Average Is Over. It’s a fascinating piece. As I reflected on the piece it struck me how important this concept is to professional selling. Friedman makes the point, “”…everyone needs to find their extra–their unique value contribution that makes them stand out…” Friedman is not writing about organizations, he’s writing about individuals, each of us. It’s a profound concept, understanding it is like discovering the secret decoder ring for sales success. In a buyer’s world, where too many products are undifferentiated, where the […]
It’s All In Your Head!
Sales people are notoriously bad at writing things down and documenting things. I talk to thousands a year. When I start talking about documenting something–a deal plan, an account plan, territory, call plans, even a to-do list–all of a sudden you can see the resistance in their faces. They sit back, fold their arms. Most say nothing, but a few courageous one’s will say, “Dave, you don’t get it. I’m too busy to do this. I don’t have time to document these things–it’s too bureaucratic–I’ve got a plan, it’s in my head!” I’m used to this. I respond, “OK, I get […]
A Different Take On Challenging Conversations
I’ve been writing a lot about changing the conversation, about challenging our customers, about getting them to think differently. A lot of readers have been sending me notes, asking for advice on how to do this. While I agree with many of the principles outlined in Challenger Selling and Provocative Selling, I take a little different view on things. The basic premise of many of these approaches is that we have to know our customers businesses better than they do, we have to have better ideas for their business or function than they do. I tend to think of this […]
What If We’re Not Important? Part 2
As I mentioned in the previous, What If We’re Not Important post, it’s always difficult to imagine what we sell and do may not be important. Don’t get me wrong, what we do is important to someone–after all if we were truly not important, then our companies would be out of business. The issue is are we important enough for the customers to invest in now? We may have great business cases, but regardless how compelling the business case, if we aren’t at the top of the hit parade of our customers’ strategic initiatives, we won’t get the order. In […]