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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
Freeing Up “Time To Sell,” A Quandary
Since the earliest days of selling, our vision is to free up sellers time to sell! Ideally, we’d like them to spend 100% of their time working with prospects and customers, helping them navigate their buying processes. But things keep creeping in, some valuable, some wastes of time. But they infringe on our dream of having sellers working 7×24 with customers. There are some necessary things–training and development to improve our ability to sell. Certain internal meetings to keep us up to date with strategies, priorities, and what’s happening with the company. Coaching–when it’s done–to help us improve our abilities […]
Confidence Eroders
Hank Barnes has been writing a fantastic series of articles focusing on Decision Confidence. One of the reasons I’m so fascinated by the article is Hank is directly appealing to my mathy-science nerdiness. Long time readers will know I often try to codify issues around mathematical equations. Hank has generated an equation on Decision Confidence: His variables are: CB = Confidence Builders V = Validation E = Level of Effort required to confirm the confidence builder. CE = Confidence Eroders I = Impact. The formula is very elegant and provokes a lot of reflection. It approaches the elegance of Einstein’s […]
Sales Innovation
Yes, I know the majority of you, justifiably, will think this title is an oxymoron. Something like jumbo shrimp, virtual reality, exact estimate, definite maybe, short meetings, job security, detailed summary, Microsoft Works (oops). This impression is reinforced by the imitative behaviors we constantly see in selling, focused on doing more of what we know doesn’t work, but doing it because that’s what everyone does. We continue to focus on pitching products, when we know we have to focus on the customer business problems. We know we have to engage customers in things they care about, yet we focus on […]
“But The Competitors’ Prices Are Less Than Ours…..”
My post, Games Sellers Play, Pricing/Discounting, generated a lot of interesting conversation and questions. One pervasive question was, “How do I compete against competitors whose price is less than ours?” Some of the discussions asked about matching prices or coming up with standard discounting, or how to find other ways to match or beat the competitors pricing. We could even extend the argument to, “our competitors have more features and functions than us, how do we compete against that?” Unless your company strategy is always to be the low price supplier (it’s hard to build a high growth/high profit business […]
We’re Long Past Our “Use By Date”
I love both my sisters dearly. But one had the most annoying habit. When she visited, she took great joy in helping prepare meals. But every once in a while, she would see an ingredient, say a can of some type of food. She would check the can for the “Use by date.” If, for instance, it was late November–Thanksgiving — she saw a can of cranberry sauce with a use by date of October of that year, she would throw it out and go to the store to buy a new can. And finding one thing that had expired […]
Memorable Leaders
All credit for this post goes to my friend, Lahat Tzvi. Lahat and I have a regularly scheduled time to talk, once a month. Our conversations are typically scheduled for an hour, they always last longer. He and I had to stop today’s conversation at two and a half hours–not because we were finished, but because we both had to run to other meetings. Our conversations are one of the events I look most forward to, each month. So thank you, Lahat! Today, our conversation wandered into leadership. We shared different projects we each were working on, discussed management and […]