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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
Questions I’m Thinking About
It’s customary, on the final day of the year, to set some goals, resolutions. We can’t help but reflect on the past year and think about the coming year. I’ve been thinking about some questions, thoughts that have been running around in my mind–some for some time. There’s a lot of overlap in some of them. For most there are no definitive answers, but we can start to approach answering them, at least within our own organizations and ourselves. Others may come up with different answers. I’m writing these primarily to generate some discussion about these issues, as well as […]
Our Customers Don’t Know How To Buy, Are We Helping Them Learn?
While it’s some years old, we all know the “spaghetti chart,” from Gartner. As a refresher, I’ve shown it below. It’s easy to understand how customers struggle with complex B2B buying. It’s easy to understand how many buying initiatives fail. The reality is customers don’t know how to buy, and have all sorts of things that divert them from their buying efforts (for example, their day jobs). After all, they aren’t buying every day. In addressing a specific issue or opportunity, they may have never faced it before, or it may have been years since they last looked for solutions […]
What If There Were No Salespeople?
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s extend all the trends we see around the mechanization and automation of sales. Let’s look at emerging trends around the rep-free buying experience some research is showing. Let’s throw in a dollop of AI, ML, and a handful of Bots. Let’s pile onto this already intriguing combination a lot of supporting research, showing the decline in the number of sales jobs. We can stir in some trends around work from anywhere, virtual selling, and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking and we can imagine: There is an argument that salespeople will no longer be […]
We Don’t Solve The “Great Resignation” With Better Recruiting!
Everyday we hear about the Great Resignation and labor shortages. People, all generations, are looking for something different in their work lives. This has unleashed recruiters. I get emails everyday from recruiters wanting to help solve the recruiting and labor shortage problem. They may be very good, they may be able to help identify great candidates. But better recruiting isn’t a solution to the Great Resignation. People are seeking a different work experience. While a lot is being made about more flexible hours, fewer hours, work from anywhere, these are also just the tip of the issues we face with […]
Considering “Irony”
We seem to be in a headlong rush to automate and depersonalize our marketing and sales engagement. It seems the future is “virtual” biasing whatever interaction we have with customers to being action at a distance through Zoom, Teams, or other platforms. We are automating our customer engagement processes, citing customer preference for “rep-less buying” experiences, ignoring the high levels of buyer regret, based on those rep-less experiences. We seem oblivious to the customer confusion, overwhelm, and uncertainty, despite the data around sensemaking and decision confidence. We seem to be racing to dehumanizing organizations and the buying experience, focusing on […]
RFP’s?
I was doing a Q&A after a keynote at a SKO. It was a very sharp group of sales people committed to improvement. A question came up, “Dave you talk about how we differentiate ourselves through creating value with the customer, helping them make sense of what they are trying to achieve, helping them have great confidence in their decision. But a large part of our business is RFP’s. We’re constrained by the structure of the process of the RFP’s, how do we help customers with that.?” It’s a great/challenging question, particularly for sales people doing government and public sector […]