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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
Would You Buy From Your Sellers?
Not long ago, I was speaking to the CRO of a sales technology company. We had a passing acquaintance, I’d been a guest on a webcast a couple of years ago, we had a few conversations and emails since then. I was, relatively, a fan of the tools they provide. I reached out to this individual, saying, “Can we have a heart to heart…..?” I suspect he was surprised and, possibly, a little confused, but he agreed. We jumped on a Zoom call, I said, “Can I share my screen?” I displayed the marketing/sales outreach emails I get from his […]
There Is Still “Low Hanging Fruit” In This Economy!
We are going through all sorts of hand wringing and belt tightening as we look to a potential recession. We are seeing large layoffs in anticipation of growth challenges in the coming months/years. Customers are beginning to cancel projects, focusing on the most critical. Many are struggling to be optimistic about how to find and close business. But there is huge opportunity, in spite of the uncertain outlook. It’s been staring at us for at least the past 10 years (that’s when I first started seeing data on this). But we’ve failed to address it. By tapping into this opportunity, […]
Why Are We So Incurious?
If I were forced to identify the single most important capability for anyone, at any level in selling, I think it would be curiosity. I wouldn’t identify prospecting, relationship building, closing, goal orientation, or any of the numerous competencies/capabilities of great sales people. I don’t mean to diminish their importance, but as you peel each of those back, underlying these capabilities is usually some aspect around curiosity. Curiosity is important in engaging our customers, it’s important when we are trying to achieve our goals, it’s what helps us through adversity, it helps us continually improve our performance. When things don’t […]
When The Going Gets Tough….
We are, in the very least, facing huge uncertainty. The global economy–are we headed to a recession, how will inflation be impacted, what does this mean to our ability to grow, what does this mean in terms of actions we might take to curtail spending, hiring? We still face supply chain challenges and uncertainties. We are looking at increases in global conflicts. We are looking at the majority of people rethinking their lives and what work means? Everywhere we turn, we see disruptions and uncertainty. Some represent tremendous opportunity, some represent threats, and some it’s too early to know. But […]
On Driving Performance
As leaders, a key element of our job is to maximize the performance of each person on our team. We do this through hiring the right people, training, giving them tools/processes/programs/systems to help them perform, providing the right support, eliminating barriers to their performance, and constantly coaching/developing them. We set performance goals, we measure their attainment against that performance. And then we get to compensation. We try to develop compensation plans that incent people to achieve those goals. Often, it’s very simple, some sort of compensation based on revenue, or possibly quota attainment. But sometimes, that’s not sufficient for achieving […]
We’ve Got The Discovery Process All Wrong!
Too often, we fail in our initial engagements with our customers. In our prospecting and discovery calls, we focus on their need for a solution–our solution. Our questions have an agenda, we want to get to talking about our solutions as quickly as possible. We may start in the right place, trying to understand the customer needs or problems, but we steer our follow up to our products as quickly as possible. For example, we might ask, “How are you doing this…..” “Do you have this problem….” “Have you seen this….” For each of these, we are trained to move […]