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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
Fools With Tools
The sales and marketing automation markets are among the fastest growing software sectors. I lost count when total numbers of apps exceeded 20,000. Companies are proud of their tech stacks, often getting into “mine is bigger than yours” discussions. I see clients with tech stacks in the double digits, paying millions in fees. At the same time, when you actually talk to people, the utilization of these tools is very low. I wish it was a minority of managers, unfortunately, it’s not, but when I meet a new client, I typically ask, “Can you pull the most current pipeline report […]
Coaching Is A Language, Part 2
Not long ago, I wrote about Coaching Is A Language. Since writing it, I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations–and workshops on the language of coaching. Fortunately, it’s very different than my college language classes in conjugating verbs, learning gender categories for nouns, and endless drills repeating the same phrase over and over until I had the pronunciation correct. We’ve always treated coaching as a discreet event and not a method of communicating. Coaching is something, if we do it, that is a meeting or activity with one of our people where we “coach” them. Too often, it doesn’t happen–data […]
Information Asymmetry
I read a post by a respected sales expert on “Information Asymmetry.” Oversimplifying it, the premise was sellers and customers struggle with buying because we have much more knowledge about our products than the customer, as a result, we have to reduce that asymmetry in how we educate our customers about our products. This is probably correct, at least for the part of the customer change process that focuses solely on product/solution selection. Hopefully, this doesn’t mean endlessly doing feature dumps on customers, rather focusing on the product capabilities that are most relevant to what they are trying to do. […]
Games Sellers Play, Pricing/Discounting!
For those who’ve followed me for some time, you know I rarely take a hardliner perspective. When someone poses a question, “What’s the best way to prospect, How should we engage our customers more effectively, What are the critical metrics, How do we help our customers buy, ……,” my answer is always, “It depends…..” I don’t mean to be evasive, because it always does depend, every situation is different and we have to adapt to what’s best for each situation we find ourselves in. But there is one area in which I am an absolute hardliner, I refuse to compromise, […]
A Weekend Challenge: Try Something New!
Over the past week or so, I’ve been writing a lot about our commitment to the status quo. How we seem to continue to do the same things, over and over, even when they are failing. I’ve written about how we are trapped in “business as usual.” I’ve gotten some questions, “Dave, how do we change, what should we do? There are so many things we need to address, where do we start? What if we fail?” As understandable as these concerns are, they stop each of us, and we don’t change–though we know we must. I know I am […]
Trapped In Business As Usual…..
Recently, I wrote, Have We Become Complacent? But there may be a different way to look at the same issue. A number of people reached out after reading the post. Many suggested, “Dave, we have never been busier! My people are working hard–they have escalating demands for prospecting, pipelines, and quota performance. Most are working very long hours. As managers, we’ve never been so busy! Between supporting our people, helping them get deals done and responding to requests from management and other parts of the organization, it’s impossible to work only 40 hours a week. We are working 50-60 hours […]