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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
On Sales/Marketing Friction
We misunderstand the concept of friction in sales and marketing. At least we look at it to narrowly. Too often, we look think of friction in terms of conflict, disagreement, or difficulty. Those are aspects of friction and it’s understandable how we may want to minimize it (at least the difficulty part of it, conflict and disagreement are part of change–we just need to manage it appropriately). But there’s another important aspect of friction that’s absolutely critical and essential to our shared success with our customers. If we look at friction–or the absence of friction from a scientific sense, the […]
Sensemaking, Selling To Customers In The Chaotic Domain
This post is the seventh in my series on Sensemaking. It’s been a long and very technical journey. Thanks for hanging in. We have a few more steps to go. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into how we sell into organizations operating in the Chaotic Quadrant, as well as what the Disorder space means to us. It builds on the previous discussion of selling in the Complex, Complicated, and Simple Quadrants. As a recap, the Cynefin […]
Replacing The Sales Funnel With The Sales Flywheel
Recently, I reread an article by Brian Halligan, Replacing The Sales Funnel With The Sales Flywheel. It appeared in HBR in November, 2018, I keep coming back to it–something about it is disturbing to me. I’ve finally been able to put together some thoughts about it. Part of my discomfort in saying anything, is that I respect Brian and Hubspot so much. Part of it is, technically, there is nothing wrong in what Brian says (though the physicist in me quibbles), but is this really helpful? Are we better served by changing our model, or are we better off fixing […]
Sensemaking, Selling To Customers In The Complex Domain
This post is the sixth in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into how we sell into organizations operating in the Complex Quadrant. It builds on the previous discussion of selling in the Complicated and Simple Quadrants. As a recap, the Cynefin model is displayed below: At a corporate or enterprise level, virtually, every organization is operating in the Complex Quadrant. In the first article of this series, I introduced the concept of […]
Marketing Success, It’s All About The “Open?”
Over the past couple of days I’ve had an “interesting” exchange with a marketing/lead gen “expert.” I had been the “victim” of one of his demand gen campaigns. As you will see, the campaign generated, not only, a negative response from me, but one in which I stated I would actively encourage people not to do business with his company. His response was, “I always measure success by open and reply rates.” As a result, his view was his campaign had been very successful. I had opened and reply, despite the fact my reply was very negative. While his reaction […]
Sensemaking, Selling To Customers In The Complicated Quadrant
This post is the fifth in my series on Sensemaking. For links to the other posts in the series, go to: Sensemaking, The Big Issue Facing Both Our Customers And Us. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into how we sell into organizations operating in the Complicated Quadrant. It builds on the previous discussion of selling in the Simple Quadrant. As a recap, the Cynefin model is displayed below: The Complicated Context is, probably, one we think we are operating in most of the time. Where the Simple Quadrant is characterized by known known and there are best […]