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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 Miss The Point In Asking About “The Future Of Selling!”
Every week, I am asked to participate in a number of interviews/webcast/discussions about the “Future of Selling.” My feed is filled with prognostications about the future of selling–and a surprising number of “gurus” with death wishes proclaiming selling is dead. There are phenomenal changes–new technologies, shifts in global economies, social changes that have a profound impact on sellers. So there are huge changes happening that impact our futures and that of our profession. But asking the question, “What’s The Future Of Selling,” is the wrong question to start with. We can’t begin to predict the future of selling until we […]
Are We Dreaming Big Enough?
One of the things that has always attracted me to selling is it forces you to dream big! I started my selling career as a very introverted theoretical physicist. But I encountered some executives who helped me understand selling and got me dreaming big about what I could achieve. At first, my dreams were about getting a customer to pay attention to me, then to win a deal, make quota, make money. Quickly my dreams moved to winning the biggest deals, chasing very tough opportunities figuring out how to win them. As I moved into management, I had dreams with […]
Our Customers Are Changing Faster Than We Are!
There seems to be an arrogance or conceit in so many of the conversations I see about the future of selling. My feeds are filled with new technologies, new selling models, new engagement strategies, new organizational structures. We have a fascination with exploring the latest, greatest tricks we can leverage. What we fail to recognize in all these conversations is our customers are quietly changing how they buy faster than we are changing how we sell. As a result, sellers are playing a losing game of catch up. Reflect back on how buying has changed over the decades. There used […]
Obsessing About What Our Customers Think Of Us
One of my favorite wastes of 30 minutes, every Friday, is to listen to Coffee With Brent Adamson and Matt Heinz. (For regular listeners of the show, you will know my tongue is deeply planted in my cheek). Not quoting Brent directly, he raised an issue of: Why are we so obsessed about what customers think of us and our products? It’s a fascinating question. In some ways it’s very natural, as human beings we tend to be self centered, we are driven by our own interests, self interests. So as sellers, it’s natural to carry that same behavior into […]
How Do We Win?
Probably one of the most important questions to sellers, at all levels is, “How do we win?” Probably a close second is, “Can we win enough to achieve our goals?” I’ve written extensively about the latter in my posts on win rates. But, the first question is more fundamental, “How do we win?” Asking a random set of sellers, the answers were unsurprising. Most respond, “We have the best product!” “It’s my superior sales ability!” And when we lose, it’s because of our products, price, competition, but never what we did as sellers. But winning (and losing) about so much […]
We Need To Change The Selling Conversation!!
I just listened to an outstanding webcast on the future of selling, conducted by four close friends. I am a student of their work, they are among the smartest thinkers about selling I’ve ever met. But as I sat through the conversation, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated. It seemed, unconsciously, the conversation around selling gravitates to SaaS selling. It’s not just them, many of the webcasts I participate in, 99.9% of the conversations I see in social media focus on SaaS selling. It seems that SaaS selling has become the center of the universe in virtually all sales conversations. […]