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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
Creating Demand……
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself involved in a number of conversations about “Creating demand….” Some have focused on marketing’s role in demand creation. Depending on whether you are in marketing or sales, there are various views of how well this is being done. Almost universally, there seems to be a demand gen problem—it has become increasingly difficult to catch prospect/customer attention, regardless of the techniques we leverage for demand gen. Every channel for reaching and engaging them is overwhelmed. Most of it is bad quality, most of it is undifferentiated, poorly targeted. Our universal solution to […]
Just One Thing…
To say we live in a world of overwhelm, overload, volatility, constant change is an understatement. Burnout, exhaustion impacts everyone at all levels. There seem to be two dominant ways of handling this overwhelm. The first is hunkering down. Focusing on what has worked in the past, hoping that, “this too will pass.” In some sense, it’s true, it does pass, something else comes up, and the confusion continues. The other way of handling this is a series of knee jerk reactions. We respond to each crisis with a shift in strategy and focus. We initiate new programs, processes, new […]
“Do Sellers Have To Have Honesty, Integrity, Transparency?”
My friend, John Smibert, wrote a great post, posing the question, “Do sellers have to have honesty, integrity, and transparency?“ Of course, we do! We have to establish trust with our customers: honesty, integrity and transparency are critical elements of this. What troubles me about John’s article is not the point of view he presents, I’m fully in support of it. What troubles me is the fact we have to pose this question, that we have to provoke people to think about this and remind ourselves how critical it is in our ability to engage and create value with our […]
“You Can’t Handle The Truth…..!!!”
One of my favorite movie scenes is Jack Nicholson’s soliloquy in A Few Good Men and the famous line, “You can’t handle the truth…!” I worry whether “we” can’t handle the truth. I and others have become broken records. Post after post, we cite examples and data that indicate something is broken. As sellers, we would hope that customers would want to engage us, but the reality is they do everything the can to minimize their need to engage selling. But we persist in the behaviors that drive customers away. We complain about how we are sold to. We share […]
Selling Process and Sales Methodology…….
Virtually every organization I work with has a real misunderstanding of Selling Processes and Sales Methodologies. Both are critical, and while complementary, they serve very different purposes. And, I think, training companies and consultants (like me), sometimes confuse these issues, not serving our clients as effectively as we should. At the risk of oversimplifying the difference. The Selling Process focuses on the “why and what” of how we engage customers in helping them navigate their buying process. A Sales Methodology focuses on “how” we execute our Selling Process. They provide us tools to facilitate our ability to effectively execute the […]
On Reflection…….
“We do not learn from experience, We learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey, American Philosopher/Psychologist. This was the opening line in one of the best posts I’ve read recently. It’s from the brilliant Suzi McAlpine, be sure to read the post: 5 ways you can build in reflection to improve performance. This is such an important principle for all of us in selling and leadership, but somehow we seem so preoccupied with activity and busyness, we fail to take the time to reflect and learn from those. We measure our success on volumes and velocity of outreaches. Yet those […]