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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
Don’t Fear Transformation, Fear Irrelevance!
A reader asked how to overcome individuals’ and organizational fear of transformation. My knee jerk reaction was that irrelevance is much more scary than transformation. Change, continuous improvement, adaptability, even transformation are not options in today’s business world. They are mandatory if we are to grow and thrive. They are virtually mandatory of we are to survive. Our business worlds are changing faster everyday. Technologies enable us to do things that, 5 years ago, were unimaginable. They enable us to engage people differently. They enable us to engage different people. Technology has shrunk time and space, so now we need […]
What Does It Mean To Be A Channel In An Omnichannel World?
All the talk in B2C and B2B these days is “omnichannel.” The B2C world has actually changed profoundly, and will continue to do so. We’re just seeing and starting to address the implications of omnichannel in the B2B world. Manufacturers are starting to embrace the concept. New tools and analytics enable manufacturers to more effectively engage customers regardless of the channel they choose at the moment. The tools enable us to have consistent conversations that build on each other as the customer engages us in different channels. If a customer engages us in a certain e-channel, moves to a call […]
If All We Use Is A Hammer…….
There’s the familiar saying, “If all you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything starts looking like a nail.” I’ve adopted this, “If all you USE is a hammer, your success is limited to finding and pounding nails.” Unfortunately, too many sales people have only one tool in their bags. It’s their product knowledge. What they are really good at doing is pitching the product. They may also be good at defending the product against alternatives. So as long as that’s all the customer cares about, there’s a good chance sales people who only carry “hammers,” those who base their […]
Providing Clarity
Regardless of our role–customer, sales person, sales manager, executive, we face similar issues. Overwhelming and conflicting information and data, rapidly shifting priorities, time and space compression, dizzying complexity, more choices yet fewer realistic alternatives, ever accelerating change, continual disruption, increasing confusion. We are expected to do more, with fewer resources, in less time, with more-but perhaps not the right information. It’s no wonder stress levels are so high, that people are tired. Often we seek refuge in the familiar, not necessarily because we want to, but because we don’t know what else to do. We are confused by choice. Often, when we should be […]
Did You Write The RFP?
I was asked to participate in a deal review. It was one of those “mega” deals, the one you dream of, the one that will make your year–or at least give it a significant boost. In preparation, I started to review the opportunity in the CRM system. I discovered my client was pretty late in the cycle. Apparently, the customer had been thinking about this problem for some time. They were one of the proverbial “70% through the buying cycle” customers. They had gotten to the point of writing an RFP, providing it to all interested parties to respond. I […]
Sales Manager Or Sales Person?
Sales manager, or sales person—-choose, you can only be one! While it seems so obvious, too many managers make the wrong choice–that is they try to be both. It always fails–it’s a disservice to your team, to your company, and most of all to yourself. There are several devastating scenarios: Sales manager as super sales person. We know what that looks like, the sales person has been working a deal, as it gets to the closing stages, the sales manager swoops in, pushing the sales person to the side and does the deal! Back in the office, his chest is […]