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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
Always Be Closing!
Recently, a number of people have asked me my thoughts on closing skills. I think they are asking me about the 8-12-15… techniques to close. I’ve never been much of a fan of these—do I use the assumptive close, the puppy dog close, …? I’ve always just asked for the order–seems to work. However, as I’ve reflected on it, I think Alec Baldwin was right in Glen Garry Glen Ross–we have to always be closing—but it’s different than what he talks about. What should we be doing, how can we, “Always Be Closing?” Closing starts long before the first call we ever […]
Insight, The Convergence Of Strategies
Insight has become the buzzword for engaging today’s buyers. We are supposed to teach our customers–helping them identify new opportunities, areas to improve, problems they may not realize they have. But we misunderstand a lot about Insight. For us to be successful, Insight requires a convergence of strategies–those of our customers and those for our own organization. Absent this, Insight has little meaning or value. Our corporate strategies shape the Insights we provide. They identify where we are best, where we create the greatest value, where we are most differentiated, and where we can profitably deliver our products and services. Consequently, Insight […]
What’s The ROI Of Stupidity?
I wrote, How Can We Deliver Insights Without Critical Thinking Skills? Along with Mike Kunkle’s 22nd Century Selling Skills presentation, it’s stirred up some interesting discussions. My friend, Gary Hart, stirred the pot a little by posing the question, “Is there an ROI in developing critical thinking skills?” I think it’s an awesome question, I think unconsciously, that may be in the minds of many business and sales leaders as they look for solutions to help improve the performance of sales people. I suppose the case can be made that we don’t need to invest in developing the critical thinking/problem solving […]
On Being Present And Engaged
We struggle to catch our customers’, our managers’, our colleagues’ attentions. We want to engage them, in the case of a customer, we want to get them interested in doing something with us. But so many times, when we actually capture someone’s attention, we rescue defeat from the jaws of victory by not being present and engaged ourselves. It happens in so many, often unconscious, ways. We may be driving our cars, seeking to be productive by making phone calls on the way. We may be sitting in our offices, doing emails or something else while we are making prospecting or other […]
How Can We Deliver Insights Without Critical Thinking Skills?
Both marketing and sales realize we need to change the conversation with customers–if we’re going to be relevant and invited to help solve their problems. The past few years, the literature has been filled with lots of approaches: Provocative Sales, Challenger Sales, Insight Based Selling–and I’m sure there are a few more. Each offers us ways to change the conversation with the customer. Likewise, there’s been a lot of good work on how top performers differ from everyone else. The one thing that seems to be missing from the conversation is the importance of “critical thinking/problem solving skills.” Instead, we seem […]
Principles Of Sales, Part 2 — Value Is Exchanged
I wrote the Not So New Principles of Sales, where I identified the second not so new principle as: “Selling is about exchanges in value between people. Each must have something the other wants, otherwise there’s no need for an exchange. The exchange can be about a variety of things: ideas, problems, dreams, information, data, opinions, and, sometimes, money.” This post dives deeper into this principle. The concept of value is tossed around a lot in any conversation about selling, but everyone has a different context or meaning for value. Also, the over-use, or misuse of the term diminishes it’s […]