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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
Leveraging Tools To Make Us Better
Over the past week or so, I’ve been on a bit of a rampage on sales and marketing automation tools. Some of my friends in those companies might be thinking, “What’s gotten into you Dave? Why are you turning your back on us?” Others of you may think I’m from the stone ages, and should just crawl back into some cave and be quiet. In reality, I’m really a strong enthusiast and advocate for leveraging automation tools as much as possible. In the hands of great sales people, they have the potential of amplifying capabilities tremendously. We’ve seen sales teams leveraging […]
How Have You Helped Your Customers Improve Their Outcomes?
As we approach the end of the year, there’s always a huge intensity of activity. A lot driven by the various holidays we celebrate, a lot driven by year end (or quarter end), and some driven by preparations for the new fiscal year. It’s easy to lose focus on our customers. But perhaps it’s worth a few minutes to reflect. Perhaps even spending some time in review with them. The key issue is, “How have you helped them improve their outcomes in the past year?” At the core of everything we do, our success is measured less on achieving our […]
Is It The Customer’s Job To See Sales People?
Recently, I read a blog post in which the author was criticizing a procurement professional who had written a post about his experience with sales people. While I didn’t get a chance to see the source post, I get the sense the procurement person took a position that he wanted to see sales people when he wanted, talking about the things he wanted to talk about. Beyond that, he had limited/no interest in engaging with sales person. The author suggested the customer was being irresponsible to themselves and their company by being so selective in seeing sales people. His position was that […]
The Search For The Silver Bullet
Human history is filled with stories and myths about the search for something “easy.” It goes back to the very beginning of human-kind, all our religious texts–regardless of religion are filled with stories of both the search for miracles and miracles created. In grade school, many of us learned about Ponce de Leon’s search in the “New World” for the Fountain of Youth. Every day, regardless of channel, we are pummeled with endless messages about miracle cures, magic elixirs, get rich quick schemes, lose fat/gain fitness. Most offered in 3 convenient payments, all ending in $__9.99. Billions, perhaps trillions are […]
When Scripts And Tools Aren’t Enough
Sales enablement continues to push the boundaries in improving the capabilities of sales professionals. New tools, training, processes, capabilities all focus on helping sales people be more impactful, relevant, timely–as well as more efficient and effective. Analytics help us identify customers with a higher propensity to buy. Prescriptive approaches help guide us down a path that maximizes success (do this, don’t do that). Playbooks tell us what to do, with who, and how to do it. There’s a never ending set of tools that enable us to research and better understand the companies and people we are engaging. But what […]
What If You Couldn’t Discount?
I always worry starting a post with, “When I first started selling…..” I fear that I sound like one of those grizzled veterans living in the past. But when I first started selling, the company did something somewhat unique. The price was the price—period, exclamation point. The quantity purchased didn’t matter, the unit price was the same. It didn’t matter if you were the largest most important customer or the smallest, the price was the same. To make things worse, our products, while very good, seldom had the latest greatest technology, we were also usually much more expensive than our […]