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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
Pipeline Management
The sales pipeline is, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood things in selling. We know the pipeline is critical to helping us answer the question, “Are we pursuing enough opportunities to achieve our goals?” We harass sellers to use CRM, keeping their opportunities updated so we can track our pipelines. Yet, too often, they are very inaccurate, gamed, or we don’t understand what the pipeline is telling us. As a result, one of the most useful tools for understanding and managing performance, is not used to it’s full power. Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a number of articles […]
On Scarcity And Abundance
The concepts of scarcity and abundance touch all aspects of our lives. The more scarce something is, the more we tend to value and want it. The more abundant something is, the more we take it for granted of fail to pay attention to it. We see it in virtually every aspect of our lives. A common example in these discussions is food. When food is scarce, we tend to be very careful with what food we acquire and consume. When food is plentiful, we are prone to huge waste and bad diets. As we look at scarcity and abundance […]
What’s Old Is New……..
I was reading an interesting article today. It concerned a group of early stage CEOs looking for “new approaches to selling.” The arguments were thoughtful–“Is there a faster easier way to scale?” These executives struggled to hire and onboard quickly enough to address the opportunity. “Is there a more cost effective way to reach customers than through a direct sales organization?” “How do we more quickly expand into new markets, where our sales people have no experience?” The “Aha” moment came to these executives when the discovered the potential of leveraging “ecosystems.” These “ecosystems” are various types of partnerships–resellers, channel […]
Data, Data, Everywhere…….
In Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, there’s a famous line, “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Today, we seem to face the same thing in selling, except now it’s data. We have more ability to collect data, about customers, about the performance of our marketing initiatives, about the performance of our sales people. We have terabytes of data we’ve never been able to collect, we’ve technology platforms and tools that enable us to leverage this data in very powerful ways. One would think the availability of this data, implementing these tools would drive huge advances […]
Will AI Replace Sellers?
Looking through my feeds, today, it seems people are fixated on ChatGPT and similar tools. More importantly, people are asking the question and taking surveys on the topic, “Will AI replace sales people?” I guess, having so many years working in selling and with sellers, these questions provoke a bored yawn. Been here, done that…… While before my time, I suspect people asked, “Catalogs replace the need for…” or “Will the telephone replace the need for door to door sales people….” or “Will email replace the need for….” or “Will the web replace the need for …..” We seem to […]
Sales People Need To Be Subject Matter Experts!
I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement, “Sales people need to be subject matter experts.” The real issue is in what? Many would argue that sellers have to be experts in the products they sell. I get it, I’m not sure if I disagree, but when there are so many alternative ways for customers to understand products, one wonders, “Is this the most important area of expertise?” We could look at it differently, perhaps posing the question, “What expertise do customers most value?” Once we understand this, then we might think, if building seller expertise in these areas […]