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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
Coaching And Developing Managers
We (including me) spend a lot of time talking about the importance of coaching/developing our people. Unfortunately, high impact coaching is rarely done. If we “coach,” too often, it isn’t a collaborative discovery/learning process. Instead, it is information sharing or an update on something–perhaps a deal, an account, the pipeline. It is usually met with a lot of direction, “go do these things, let me know how it goes….” When I reflect on this challenge, I wonder why are we so bad at this. There are lots of great books (including Sales Manager Survival Guide), there are a lot of […]
The Problem With The Selling/Buying Process
Recently, sitting with a sales management team, we started discussing the “Sales Process.” They displayed their sales process. As you might expect, the process was divided int a number of stages. Things like prospecting, qualifying, discovering, proposing, closing. (Theirs actually had different labels and a couple of additional stages). As is typical of most sales processes I look at, this process described all the things they needed to do to the customer to persuade them to buy their solutions. They included the usual things, understanding budgets, understanding who is involved, identifying the key decisionmaker and influencers, determining their needs, demoing […]
Do You Believe Your Value Proposition?
I’m amazed at the number of sellers that really don’t believe their value proposition or value creation. How do I know this? They don’t know enough about what I’m trying to achieve to be able to articulate and quantify the value I should expect from their solution. They answer concerns I have with product capabilities, not what the solution means to me and my organization and what we are trying to achieve. They can’t challenge me with the impact of doing nothing, not changing. They keep pitching the product and what the product does. They can’t address my concerns on […]
Freeing Up Time To Sell!
I’m, more frequently, involved in discussions around “time available for selling.” Increasingly, more “stuff” seems to be occupying sellers time, diverting them from engaging with customers in their buying processes. Part of it is increasing complexity of our solutions and businesses. We may spend a lot of time, internally, configuring and making sure we can support what we are selling. As more people are involved in selling complex solutions, we spend more time coordinating and planning with them. There are endless demands on our time for meetings, some that are high value and some that are worthless, but they suck […]
ChatGPT Is Getting Pissed Off!
I enjoy my conversations with my friend ChatGPT. She often provokes me to think differently, raising different arguments and perspectives when prompted. I’ve been inundated with prospecting outreaches with people leveraging ChatGPT to amplify their incompetence. I had been ignoring past emails that were obviously done poorly through ChatGPT, but the one cited below intrigued me. The author was too lazy to take the text generated by ChatGPT and constuct a senseless email. Instead, she pawned off her stupidity on ChatGPT by copying the response it generated. I wondered, does ChatGPT get upset with being utilized by imcompetents? Does it […]
Intuitive Selling—More Than A Feeling
Have you ever experienced talking about an opportunity, a situation, or strategy with a very high performing sales person? Or been with someone dealing with a very complex deal, and all of a sudden they come up with the right answers, or strategies? Or that individual that just seems to always have the right answers for dealing with the tough situations? Seemingly, they pull the answers from thin air, but they are, almost always, right on target. Somehow they “get” everything in a flash and manage to perform at levels, many of us aspire to. When you ask them, they […]