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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
Paying Attention To The Cues/Clues
It’s pop quiz time. Be honest, don’t scroll down to get the answer. Here we go: You are a seller, you get a notification that I have downloaded a research report offered on your website. The research is the results of a market study on sales performance. When you call to me to follow up, what do you think I might be most interested in? A: My interest in the market research and whether I might want to learn more.B: Your products. Maybe, you decide to spend 5 minutes doing some prep/research before calling me. You might look at my […]
When Is An Interruption Not An Interruption?
I see lots of conversations about “interrupting our customers.” There are various opinions, pro and con. But, frankly, I think too many are, largely, missing the point. An interruption is only an interruption when we waste that person’s time! As a result, the discussion should be more focused on, “How do we create value in every interaction with our customers?” Let me unpack these a little. There are some, “no interruption,” advocates. Basically, the thinking is, “We will respond to the customer outreach.” That outreach can be an inbound request. It can be a discussion about next steps, follow-up, in […]
Who Said No? Why?
My friend Brian MacIver added a brilliant comment to my post “On Consensus Buying.” I’m shamelessly taking his idea on identifying “Who said no,” and expanding on it. Let me back up. We know some things to be true about modern complex B2B buying. There’s seldom “A Decisionmaker.” For a complex decision, it’s a group of individuals, with differing priorities and interests. There may be people that exercise more influence in the process, but it is rarely a single person. The size of the decision making group is growing. Part of it is that when we are considering a complex […]
Innovation And Change; How History Should Inform Us, Yet Not Constrain Us….
I’ve been involved in business, primarily customer facing or leadership roles, for about 40 years. As a result, I’ve gained a lot of experience—some good, some bad—but all of which I’ve learned from. I’m constantly amazed at how we have the tendency to ignore the lessons of history. This isn’t unique to business, selling, marketing. We see it in society, our communities, our families. It isn’t unique to any generation. When I was a “kid,” I tended to think of the “older folks,” that, “It’s different, you just don’t get it…..” Some mentors were patient enough to say, “Dave, you […]
On Consensus Buying
We know that most complex B2B buying is a consensus process. Everybody in the buying group has to align around a set of goals in order to make a buying decision. We, also, know the buying group tends to grow. It’s somewhere in the “mid-teens” for large complex buying decisions. As sellers. we typically reach out to as many people in the buying organization as we can. We seek to determine their goals/objectives, understand their issues, what they are looking for, and how we can best help them. We start with discovery calls to each of the buyers, trying to […]
Buying The Way I Want To Buy, Not How You Want Me To Buy
I just received a note from Amazon. I had just bought a Kindle book. Along with the order acknowledgment, they congratulated me on earning a book credit of $1.40. I get those, often, but for some reason I paid attention to the email today. What leapt out to me was the fact that I had to use this credit in a very short period of time, otherwise it would expire. I found it mildly annoying. If Amazon’s systems analyzed my purchases of ebooks, I tend to order at least $100 a month. So I know, that I will be able […]