Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Sales Enablement, The Sound Of One Hand Clapping
Again, I have to start this post with an apology. I’m a huge fan of sales enablement and some of the outstanding sales enablement practitioners who I count as friends. I think, however, one of the biggest problems with sales enablement is not what they do, or the quality of the programs they develop. I think one of the biggest problems with sales enablement comes from outside the organization, with sales executive leadership and front line management. Recently I had a fascinating conversation with a sales enablement team. It’s a team that I think of as modeling some of the […]
“Still The Question Recurs, ‘Can We Do Better?'” — Abraham Lincoln
“Still the question recurs ‘can we do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the storm present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew, and act anew.” — President Abraham Lincoln in his Annual Address to Congress (December 1, 1862) High performers, and great leaders are never satisfied. They are always challenging themselves, their teams, and organizations with “Can We Do Better?” This challenge is always with us. When things are bad, when we aren’t achieving our goals, it becomes, “We […]
Enabling Our Customers To Feel Good About Themselves And What They Are Doing
I wrote, People Buy From People, focusing on the importance of human based engagement as a wake up call to the overwhelming trend to depersonalize the relationship. In comments on the post, Larry Levine and Brent Adamson added some fascinating and important insights (though I struggle with the concept of Brent creating insights–it just doesn’t seem to be him 😉 As sales people we learn about the importance of developing relationships with our customers. The old school version of this was people liking us. The idea that the more people liked us, the more they might unconsciously be biased to […]
Selling Skills
Here’s a pop quiz for sellers and sales enablement folks. Be honest, don’t cheat…….. Raise your hand if you have had a formal training program on change and change management! If you are a sales enablement person, Does your sales training/learning program included formal training and development on change and change management? Our sales training programs spend a lot of time helping us develop skills around what we sell and how we sell. We have endless classes and programs around what we sell—our products and services. We have terrific programs about how we sell. They may be broadly based methodology […]
Gaining Consensus, “Yes?” “Meh..” “No?”
We know that complex B2B decisions are driven by consensus. The days of “the decisionmaker,” influencers, and financial buyers, technical buyers, and so forth are gone — even though achieving consensus requires many of those players. Likewise, we know the number of people involved in the buying process continues to increase. In the 10+ years since Challenger was originally published, the number of people involved in the buying process have more than doubled. When we think of consensus, sometimes we think in egalitarian terms, “We want everyone impacted to be part of the decision-making process…..” While that may be true, […]
“People Buy From People…..”
I don’t know how many times I’ve read this mantra about selling. I don’t know how many times I’ve repeated it, myself. Somehow, today, I read it in some post, and the irony caused me to burst out laughing! We constantly talk about people buying from people. We talk about the importance of building relationships, or caring, or understanding. We talk about the importance of building trust. We look for empathy, perhaps, even sympathy. These are all characteristic skills in effective human to human interaction and engagement. And we continue to reiterate the mantra, “People buy from people…..” The irony […]