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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
Helping Your Customer “Connect The Dots”
As sales people, we know we have to engage our customers in disruptive thinking. We need to them to think about their businesses or functions differently, we need them to see new opportunities, we need them to recognize changes going on all around them. As we look at our customers from the outside, what we see is a corporate level view. We see the positioning of the company, we see the priorities of top management. We understand their strategies for growth, for competing. It’s these that drive or should be driving the actions, behaviors of everyone in the organization. Yet […]
“Tell Me About Your Business Pain….”
“Tell Me About Your Business Pain…..” We all recognize this, or it’s variants as a classic start to a prospecting or discovery call. Each of us has probably used this phrase thousands of times. The motivation behind this question is great. It’s focusing us on the customer, getting to understand them, their problems and concerns. It’s very powerful to get the customer talking and for us to learn. Increasingly, however, in the world of crazy-busy customers, this question is irrelevant, or in the least ineffective. This is how this plays out in real life. Case 1: The customer has come […]
Talent Trumps Everything!
Billions are invested in the latest sales and marketing automation tools. Billions are spent on training of all sorts. We spend countless hours looking at the right processes, the right systems, the right tools, the right metrics. Managers spend countless hours developing strategies and making sure plans/goals/programs/metrics are in place to execute the strategies as effectively and efficiently as possible. If managers are doing the right job, they are investing time in coaching and developing each person on their teams–getting them to reach the highest levels of performance. All of this is meaningless if you have the wrong people! Peter […]
It’s Plan AND Execute!
It’s strategic planning season–at least for those companies on a fiscal calendar. For the past 2-3 months, I’ve been involved in working with a number of clients on their “strategic plans.” Usually, these are driven by the end of a fiscal year. People use the annual strategic planning process to drive major changes in what they want to do. It makes sense, we reset everything to zero at the beginning of the new fiscal year. It’s usually a great opportunity to look at major shifts in strategy, changes in what the organization is trying to do, and investments that need […]
It’s Not My Job To Teach You How To Prospect Me!
Before I start this post, I have a confession. I’m oddly drawn to really bad prospecting–particularly from companies selling tools or services to help sales people prospect. Perhaps it’s a deficiency in my character or something wrong in my upbringing, though Mom and Dad did the very best they could with the material they had. But I’m obsessed by really bad prospecting. Most people would see a bad email title, or read the first couple of sentences of a poorly constructed email and either trash or Spam it. I do that with the “normal” bad prospecting. You know the kind, […]
Being Interesting
Millions of people hours are spent every day confronting the issue, “How do we get our customers to be interested in us?” Marketing spends millions in content strategies, overlaid with all sorts of promotion programs. Sales looks for insights or provocation. Together, marketing and sales looks for provocative prospecting messages and approaches. In the escalating volume and noise of digital/social platforms, being provocative or even outrageous seems to rule. All focused on the concept of being interesting to our prospects and customers. In reality, being interesting isn’t that difficult. To be interesting, we have to be interested. We have to be […]