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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
Ask Us (Almost) Anything!
I’m excited to announce a new LiveStream series! Aaron Evans and I are cohosting a series, Ask Us (Almost) Anything! Aaron is someone I’ve deeply respected for some time. He has one of the most thoughtful points of view on selling that I’ve experienced—though sometimes we disagree. We, also, share a deep pride in our profession, with hopes to see it continue to grow and improve in the value sellers create with customers. Aaron and I go back and forth with each other. Asking questions, challenging each other on different ideas. We each, field questions from sellers everyday. Frequent readers […]
Seller Engagement, Are We Asking Ourselves The Right Questions?
We are encountering unprecedented turnover, engagement, talent acquisition/retention issues, at all levels in selling roles. The great resignation, quiet quitting, employee engagement, and other terms have become commonplace in corporate talent conversations. At the same time, we read about “burn out.” Simultaneously, we are facing recession and talent shortages in key seller roles. Leaders look at substantive layoffs, while at the same time continue critical recruiting. We see declines in tenure, at all levels in selling. Tenures of roughly 11 months! Leaders are struggling with what to do……. They ask, “How do we create comp plans that attract and retain […]
SDRs And AEs, Do We Have Things Backwards?
I’ve always had a contrarian opinion about the roles of SDRs and AEs. While these roles can be very important, often, I think we have our ideas about these roles backwards. As a result, we set both up for failure. First, let me focus the discussion. For highly transactional, inbound buying. Perhaps the current approach works. It might work better, though. But for complex B2B, particularly outbound, the model is set up for failure. Of course, many of you will talk about your success in implementing this, but I suspect you could be much more successful. And the data shows […]
Do Your Sellers Know How To Converse With Your Customers?
I spend a lot of time in non-English speaking countries. My French and German are, barely passable. Sometimes, I struggle a little in Ireland, Australia, and the UK (Yes, they are non-English American speaking countries 😉 I spend a lot of time in the Nordics and Northern European countries. Fortunately, they speak English better than I. But then there’s the Far East. I can’t “talk to” my clients in China, Korea, Japan, or Southeast Asia. This inability to talk to these clients can be crippling. Even though, there is someone translating, it’s really difficult to really understand and connect with […]
Problem Solvers Or Problem Responders?
One of the great joys of working with sellers and leaders is that, generally, we are people of action. A core part of our jobs is solving problems. Whether it’s helping our customers solve their problems and grow, or doing the same around our own performance or growth. We tend to be proud of our ability to leap into action, responding to a customer’s query, or taking action on new growth opportunities. As managers, our job is to solve problems. Again, we leap into action to address them, but too often that response looks like “Ready, fire, aim……” Are we […]
Oh No! It’s A RFP?!?
I recognize that I’m jumping around in my continued series on “Things we thought we understood about selling, but really don’t.” Today’s topic is RFPs. Normally, I do everything I can to ignore these, but in talking to clients, I realize how misunderstood these are, and how poorly we leverage the RFP process. First, I have to confess a bias. We never respond to a RFP that we haven’t written! While that sounds arrogant, it illustrates the key point we miss about RFPs and managing them. Recently, I spoke to a VP of Sales. He said, “Most of our business […]