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
Why Should We Expect Our Customers To Change?
What sellers do is drive customers to change. Whether it’s a change effort they’ve initiated, or we are trying to incite them to change. But why should we expect them to change, particularly when sellers have failed, so miserably, to change the things we do in creating value with our customers? It strikes me as the height of irony–or perhaps arrogance–that we continue to do the things we have always done, perhaps with a new jargon or a veneer of technology, but fundamentally too few of us have changed how we sell. We have hundreds to thousands of books, we […]
Doing The Whole Job
LinkedIn is filled with surveys about, “What is the highest priority focus for [Fill In Your Favorite Role]?” There are surveys asking for the one area sales managers should focus on. These cover things like comp/metrics, training, forecasts, hiring, sometimes even coaching. There are surveys for sellers covering things like prospecting, pipeline management, closing, sales process. These surveys fill my feed, each trying to suggest, “If we/I do this one thing very well, we/I will achieve our goals.” If sales management and selling were that easy….. The problem is, these are false choices. We can’t choose which part of the […]
Our Commitment To “Just Good Enough”
My news feeds are filled with discussions about great customer engagement. Whether it’s marketing, sales, customer experience, there are endless discussions about the principles and practices of great sales and marketing. Writers, commenters are universally agreed on some fundamental principles, whether it’s effective prospecting, being customer focused, messaging, deal strategies, value creation. They talk about what drives high performance, they talk about strong leadership, coaching, purposed, culture, values. They talk about investing in developing people and maximizing their performance. Discussions about training, tools, technology, processes, programs and other things that drive performance and higher levels of customer engagement. While there […]
54% Of Buying Journeys Fail!
This data point has persisted for at least 10 years. Perhaps, if updated, it would be even worse. But 54% of committed customer buying efforts end in no decision made. It should cause all of us pause. It should force us to think differently. This data originally appeared in much of the research around Challenger, led by Brent Adamson, Matt Dixon, and Nick Toman. But let’s reflect on the implications of data and what it means to our customers and our own organizations. These were funded efforts. That is these customers had committed funding to address a problem or opportunity. […]
Conversational Intelligence
First, while I believe there is huge potential with conversational intelligence, I have to confess a lot of cynicism in how it is sold and used today. Sometimes, I tend to think conversational intelligence is an oxymoron. It doesn’t help that some of the “big names” in the field of conversational intelligence give the magic formula for successful sales conversations is to ask 4 questions and swear. This week, following their sage advice, my script on prospecting calls is: “Hi, my name’s Dave, what’s yours? How the hell are you doing? What did you think of the playoff games this […]
Driving Innovation In Selling
How do we innovate in selling? How do we change, adapt new methods, approaches, even entirely new business models to engage our customers more effectively? How do we learn and grow? Sadly, too often, we don’t challenge ourselves with these questions. “If it ain’t broke…….” The problem is, it IS BROKEN! Year after year, we see declined in percentage of people achieving quota, declines in our ability to achieve our goals. Customers are, increasingly, seeking a rep-free buying experience. Yet we keep doing what we’ve always done, at ever increasing volumes. Not long ago, I saw an interesting discussion. One […]