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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
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 […]
What We Miss About Value
The majority of sellers don’t understand value. As a result, the only thing they talk about is the product–it’s features and functions, customers using the solutions, how great their company is, and how the product is better than competition. They don’t understand the customer, as a result, can’t translate what the solutions mean to the customer. Perhaps, they’ve been trained generally, so they understand the solution might improve productivity, reduce costs, improves quality, or help drive revenue. They quote results from other customers and cite generalities about the results those customers have achieved. But they can’t translate it to specific […]
The Problem With Algorithms
Our lives seem dominated by algorithms. Sign onto Amazon or any other shopping site, and we are pummeled with recommendations, all based on what we’ve bought and recent searches we may have made. Many of our news feeds present content based on that which we have read and consumed in the past. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social channels are (in)famous for feeding us content based both on our interaction with the content and their insight into activity on other sites. All of this is targeted at maximizing our time on these sites (and our spending) based on the predictions on […]