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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
Problem Or Product Focused Selling?
It’s Monday morning, I’ve just cleared my email and social feeds. Each of us experiences the same thing, grumbling at the terrible quality outreach. Then, too many of us turn around and inflict bad outbound prospecting on our own victims. 100% of the prospecting messages I see are product focused. The outbound communications are something like: Sometimes, the product pitches are thinly veiled by a problem: Every prospecting message I see focuses on the sender, their products, and their companies. Nothing focuses on our priorities and our company. But unless the prospect is very late in their buying process, product/solution […]
Making Things Tougher Than Need Be
Let’s play a thought experiment. Imagine you are the CRO, possibly the CEO of a company offering complex B2B solutions. Let’s imagine we had a game show, a group of CROs and we are giving them the choice to select what’s behind Door # 1 or Door # 2. Our host, Monty Hall, yells, “CROs come on down…..” Then Monty says, “Johnny, tell our contestants what’s behind Door #1 and Door #2!” Johnny comes on, in his deep voice says, “Thank you Monty! CROs which will you choose….?” After presenting what’s behind Door #1 and Door #2, Johnny goes on: […]
“You Started This Conversation, Why Can’t You Hold Up Your End Of It….?”
It was a provocative outreach. The seller identified an issue he thought was impacting our company. He opened with, “We see this challenge…… impacting organizations like yours. We think you can be doing better……” Intrigued, it was an important issue (it always is for small businesses), I responded, “What causes you to say we face that issue and can do better?” Quickly, he responded, “I’d like to schedule a meeting where we can demo our solutions….” I stopped him, “No you raise a fascinating issue and seem to think we can do better. I’d love to learn more about what […]
Our Job Is Helping The Customer, But All We Do Is Focus On Beating The Competition…..
I have to start this post with an acknowledgement and a concern about misinterpretation/misapplication of this article. With that as forewarning, let me dive into this. The majority of our sales engagement strategies involve us in only the very latest stages of our customers’ buying journeys. While we claim to want to help the customer solve their problems, we aren’t. By the time we engage the customer, the customer has determined how they will solve the problem. Our only involvement is influencing which vendor they are choosing to implement in that solution. As a result we win by beating the […]
AI, Salespeople, And The “Last Mile Problem”
AI offers tremendous promise to help sellers become much more efficient. A lot of the tasks that take seller time can be more effectively handled with AI tools. Properly used, with the right prompt engineering, AI can help us better understand potential issues our customers face. We can, for instance, ask it for issues facing certain roles. We can ask it to look at certain industries/markets, or types of companies. We can even provide financial reports and other data, that can be incorporated into the analysis and recommendations. We can invest a lot of time in refining our prompts, feeding […]
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 […]