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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
Settling….
I have to confess my lack of patience with an attitude I see permeating much of our world today. Recently, I find myself having more conversations with colleagues similarly impatient. We are disappointed, we struggle to understand what we see going on–particularly in much of business and selling. We wonder, “Do we have unrealistic expectations? Have things changed that substantially since we started (some, thought not all of us have been around the block more than a few times)? What’s happening, why? Ultimately, we get to the question, “Is that just the way things are…….” And we choose not to […]
Finding The Pain
For decades, sellers have been instructed to “find the pain!” We’ve been trained, almost like doctors, to diagnose our customers’ pains; “Does it hurt here? What about when I do this? How often do you experience it? Is it most severe after a poor earnings report? Once we and the customers have diagnosed the pain, we prescribe a solution. But there are real problems with this concept. The most superficial, is that we are looking for “pains” where our solution resolves their pain. Using the medical analogy, if I have a constant cough, is buying cough drops the right diagnosis, […]
Discovering And Qualifying Is Not Just For Sellers
Discovery and qualifying are critical to sellers. We use discovery to understand the customer’s needs, problems, requirements. We use discovery to understand the capabilities they seek in looking at solutions. We use discovery to understand their budgets, the alternatives they are considering, their knowledge of and interest in us, how they will make the decision, and when. Our focus on discovery is making an assessment, “Does the customer have needs and requirements that our products address, do we think we might have a strong possibility of competing and winning. Qualification enables us to understand that the customer is committed to […]
Bits And Pieces, 20 May, 2023
Since migrating to the new platform several months ago, subscribers to the newsletter get my blog posts and updates. But you may not be aware of new content I am adding as videos, podcasts, and livestreaming. I wanted to let you know of recent content you may find interesting: Videos: I was, recently, hosted by Mark Hunter of the Sales Hunter Podcast, for a video and podcast on “How Not To Use AI To Prospect.“ In March, the team at Scale Venture Partners, hosted a webcast, “Uncovering Sales Leverage Points.“ In February, I hosted Corey Richardson of Teamworks and Jeff […]
“Foreign Language” Training Must Be Mandatory For Sellers!!
A lot of you might be scratching your heads, “What is Dave talking about, all our customers speak Mandarin, or English, or Spanish, or Japanese, or Australian (Yeah, I still struggle with Australian)?” I struggle with French and German, usually beginning conversations with “Parlez vous Anglais?” “Sprichst du Englisch?” I’m relieved when they say “Yes…” When we speak a common language, we are able to connect and communicate effectively with each other. And when we don’t….. Despite my struggles with speaking different languages, I think Foreign Language Training must be mandatory for every seller. CROs must start charging their Sales […]
Reimagining The “Corporate Deck”
We’ve all done it—we’ve victimized our prospects and customers with the “Corporate Deck.” And we’ve be been victims of sellers pitching us their versions of the deck. We know how these “glamor” pieces work. They are all about corporate vanity and follow almost the same format: The first few slides tell the customer who we are and how great we are. They show things like how many people work in the company, how many countries we we are in, how great our financial performance has been, our market cap and claims of being a unicorn. Lots of facts, figures, charts. […]