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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
We Are Efficient, But Are We Effective?
Time is a problem. We never have enough. And regardless what we do, we never will. Whatever time we tend free up, is immediately filled with something else and we become time poor, once again. We have endless tools and technologies, increasingly assisted by AI, enabling us to accomplish more in each hour. The goal of each of these is increasing our efficiency. If I think, for example, the evolution of “prospecting letters.” I started in sales, about 5 years before emailing became popularized. To send a prospecting letter, I had to write it in longhand and give it to […]
Customers Need Help, But Do We Want To Be Helpful?
Just finished a fascinating discussion with my good friend, Charles Green, and my new friend, Miles Veth. As our conversations often go, we were talking about the state of selling and how we improve. The conversation got me thinking about the issue: “Our customers desperately need help, but do we want to be helpful, do we know how to be helpful? We, everyone, face worlds of accelerating turbulence, disruption, risk, and uncertainty. We face issues we may not have experienced before. We are, often, so busy we may not recognize threats or opportunities to change, improve grow. And when we […]
Our Unique Value Proposition
As sellers, we always talk about the importance of our “Unique Value Proposition.” For decades, we have thought about our value proposition in the context of our products/solutions. And we focused on our differentiation to determine our uniqueness. We would go through endless detail about the unique and differentiated capabilities of our products and solutions. We train our people, endlessly, about all the capabilities of our products and their superiority over the competition. “We have these features and functions, no other alternative has those….” Each of us would be presenting our unique list, thinking those would have an impact on […]
Are You Provoking The Right Questions?
We often gauge the quality of our conversations by the responses we get in those conversations. I have learned to gauge the quality of the conversation, the quality of engagement by the questions the people are asking. If there are no/few questions, there is very little engagement. If the majority of the questions are closed ended, the engagement isn’t much better. It’s the deep probing, deeper questions that tell me how engaged the people I’m talking to are (and how engaged I am.) How do we provoke this level of engagement? How do we engage people in ways that encourage […]
The Power Of “Ad Hoc” Coaching
As leaders, we know our job is to maximize the performance of our people. We know that coaching is one of the highest leverage methods of maximizing their performance. We know we should schedule reviews with our people, integrating coaching into those reviews. Whether it’s a deal review, account review, pipeline, prospecting forecast, territory, or a one on one, we get great power integrating coaching into each of these. As much as we know the importance of this, as much as we may want to coach our people in these meetings, reality smacks us in the face. We don’t have […]
Is Selling Dead Or Dying?
It’s interesting to see continued predictions of the death of selling. There are all sorts of variations. Some focus on PLG types of approaches, where the product sells itself–at least until one wants to scale that to the enterprise level. Others see the preference of buyers for rep-free buying experiences and digital buying processes as evidence that selling is no longer necessary. It’s interesting, all of the articles I read about the death of selling comes from sellers, or “experts” on selling. I tend to read widely, one of the areas I study is the future of procurement. I never […]