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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
“The Foot Bone Connected To The Leg Bone, The Leg Bone Connected To……”
There’s the old children’s song, “The Skeleton Dance.” It starts with “the foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connected to the knee bone…” It’s really a discussion of systems. The human body wouldn’t function without all the components or subsystems working together. Business and what we do as sellers is a set of interconnected/interdependent subsystems. For our organization to work, to achieve it’s goals and purpose, each subsystem must work, effectively, together. Regardless of our role, we can only succeed if all the other subsystems we depend upon perform as expected. Systems are complex, […]
Sales Management, We Understand The Pieces/Parts, But Not The Whole
I’m continuing my series on the importance of understanding selling as a complex system. We tend to focus on the pieces/parts of what we do, the responsibilities of our organization, for example marketing, SDRs/Inside Sales, AEs, Account Managers, Sales Engineering, Sales Ops, Sales Enablement. We optimize the pieces parts, yet when taken together they under perform. Today, I want to focus on Sales Management. Specifically, I’ll focus on a major error I made when publishing Sales Manager Survival Guide, and how I had to readjust to correct it. For those of you who’ve read the book, you know it’s a […]
The “Sales Tolerance Stack Up Problem”
As an engineer, I learned it is impossible to design and build the perfect part. While the design itself provides exact specifications, the part would have some variation when actually manufactured. So in designing products, we would always specify the acceptable tolerances for the part. For example, if we wanted to drill a hole in the center of a square plate, we would identify both the size of the hole and the exact center of the hole, +/- a certain tolerance. It might look like “Drill a 1 inch hole 3 inches from the left side, 3 inches from the […]
Do Sellers Really Understand How Businesses Work?
I’ve been reflecting on projects I’ve been helping clients with over the past few years (in reality, I suspect I can trace it back further.) That coupled with conversations with hundreds of sellers and managers, I’ve come to a conclusion that even surprises me. Before I wrote this, I had conversations with a number of colleagues, testing my premise. I had hoped they would prove me wrong. Sadly, they agreed with me. The realization is, most sellers don’t really understand how businesses work. They understand certain parts, for example they can work with their customers, say IT. They understand, somewhat, […]
Business Relevance
Today, I had the pleasure of working with the students of Howard Dover’s UTD Digital Prospecting class. We were talking about the importance of business relevance and acumen in engaging customers. The session was fascinating, the questions were great. I’m so happy these undergraduate students, looking toward careers in sales, are tackling this issue (I wish experienced sales people were as sensitive to this, as they.). I thought it might be useful to share some of the conversation: Why is it important to have an understanding of the customer’s business? Our customers want to know the sales people they engage […]
Collaborative Creativity
I participate in lots of sales calls. Sometimes observing what’s going on, sometimes as a contributor. Most of the time, they seem like “verbal ping pong.” Someone asks a question or makes a statement (seller or customer), the other responds. Back and forth, sometimes agreeing, sometimes objecting, all practiced, mindless responses–back and forth. And every once in a while, someone tries to win by the verbal equivalent of “slamming the ball,” defeating the other, but no one has really won. And these progress through the customer buying process. Call after call, meeting after meeting. But every once in a while, […]